Nancy Cook was born in Winston-Salem, NC, on September 14, 1929, to Tom and Flossie Cook. She grew up in Clemmons, a small farming community just outside of Winston-Salem. Her father owned the mill with his father-in-law and brother-in-law and her mother was a school teacher.

Mom had an older brother, Herman, who is 91 and lives in Columbus, OH, and a younger sister, Jane, who lived in SC and died about two years ago. My grandmother was one of nine children, most of whom also lived in Clemmons or nearby, and her many cousins were among Mom’s earliest playmates.

Mom was quite the piano player. She actually started learning to play before her family even owned a piano. She had to go to the church to practice, or to her grandmother’s house. When there were no other options, she had a cardboard keyboard that she spread out on the dining room table and used to practice. When she was about 10, her father traded some work for a piano, which was brought to their house in the back of a pickup truck. My grandfather wouldn’t let them unload the piano until Mom jumped up on the back of the pickup and tried it out.

Mom studied piano in college and worked as a public school music teacher. One of her first jobs was at the North Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind, where she taught piano to blind students. The way she explained it, the students would read a few measures of music in Braille and then immediately play it. They basically had to memorize everything they played. I heard about the blind students and how hard they worked whenever I complained about how challenging my own piano lessons were. Mom “retired” from full-time teaching after I was born, but taught piano lessons to children and adults and worked as a choir director, organist and pianist at several churches in the communities in which they lived.

Her greatest joy was to play, not only the classical music that she studied in school or the religious music she played in church, but most anything. She played show tunes, she played popular music, she even occasionally played Boogie Woogie. For my parents’ 60^th anniversary she performed Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin – and she emphasized the fact that it was the original arrangement, not a simplified one. One of Mom’s most prized possessions was a Steinway Grand Piano, which she brought when she went to San Francisco on a business trip with Dad. There was a piano shop down the street and every day she went and visited the piano, entertaining customers with the songs she’d learned through the years. At the end of the week, she made one last visit and bought the piano, which the company shipped to Wilmington, NC, where they lived. Dad said his coworkers claimed Mom put new meaning to bringing home souvenirs from a trip.

Mom also taught us all to sing. The acoustics were especially good in our 1968 Chevrolet Carryall and we spent much of the time on car trips singing in seven-part harmony. Well, most of those parts don’t exist in the real world. We sang old songs from Mom and Dad’s youth like When You Wore Your Tulip and Down by the Old Mill Stream. We sang choir songs and songs we learned through the years at various camps we attended. When my son was in Third Grade he had a teacher who sang a lot with the students. One day he was trying to tell me a song she taught them and finally he said, “You sing it, Mom. You know all the songs.”

Mom was an avid gardener and grew much of our food, especially in the years where there were three or four teenagers in the house. I was talking to my brother, Eric, about the garden and he said, “That was Mom’s garden? I thought it was OUR garden!” She certainly believed that children should have chores, and working in the garden was one of our major ones. She canned, mostly green beans and tomatoes. One year she dried apples in the back of the Carryall, which smelled like a winery for months afterward. We used to tell her she had enough vegetables in the basement for a seven-year famine. She made a cookbook for each of us because she got tired of us calling to ask for the same recipes again and again.

Our trips as a family involved usually involved camping in an eight-man canvas tent, although we did make an annual trip to the beach. In her 40s, the family went on its first ski trip but she wasn’t too impressed. “Skiing is so expensive,” she said, “$30 for the lift ticket, $15 to rent skis, $500,000 for the chalet.”

Mom preferred fishing. One day each of us got a postcard about her fishing trip the day before. There was a storm offshore and the fish were biting. She went out on the pier with all those grizzled old men and caught 94 fish. She was very excited. We ate those fish every time we visited Wilmington for months. Sandy says she still won’t eat fish because of it.

When Dad was in his 50s, he started riding a motorcycle. He wasn’t gone for but a few weekends when Mom decided she needed to ride a motorcycle, too. She was never the type of woman to sit on the back of a motorcycles with her arms around her man. She had her own bike. She had to get one with the seat cut down so her feet would reach the pavement. After she’d been riding for a while, she decided she needed a more powerful bike. After a long discussion on the topic with my brother, Alan, he looked at me and said, “There’s something I never thought I’d hear my mother say. I need a bike with more power.” She and Dad went on motorcycle tours around the U.S. and in Canada, Great Britain, the Swiss Alps, and New Zealand.  At 70 she passed the bike along to my brother, Eric, and he is still riding it regularly although it is now 30 years old and has 42,000 miles on it.

Nancy Welfare was a loving wife, mother and grandmother. She was a musician whose legacy lives on through her many students, and her children and grandchildren. Most of us didn’t become professional musicians ourselves, but music continues to fill our lives.

We’ll miss you Mom. Thanks for the music, thanks for the laughter, thanks for the love.