It started years and years ago, my mom’s little joke about my birthday.

I was still in elementary school the first time she used it on me. It was a beautiful fall morning in October and I was just waking up when I saw Mom’s smiling face peep around my bedroom door.

“Get up, sleepyhead – what do you think this is, your birthday?” she teased – with a mischievous twinkle in her brown eyes.

It was, of course, so we both laughed and laughed. I loved laughing with my mom, she had such a wonderful sense of humor and was so much fun to be around.

So, every October 24th after that – in person or on the phone – my mother would make it a point to give me her “what do you think this is, your birthday?” bit. And for some reason I never got tired of it. In fact, it eventually became an annual ritual that I really looked forward to. Each year I would wonder if she would finally forget to say it, but she never did.

When I got married and moved away from Arkansas, I would anticipate all year her still-girlish voice pronouncing my expected birthday greeting. It never failed to make us both smile.

But last October, for the first time since I was a little girl, mom wasn’t able to give me her usual birthday greeting. Cancer took her body and Heaven claimed her soul last Spring. By the time my birthday rolled around, I knew that was going to be a day I would miss her more than ever. But a card that came in the mail for me that day at work made me smile as if mother herself had sent it.

The card was from one of my mother’s sisters, Minnie DeHart. It said:

October 24th -- Happy Birthday. Hope you have a beautiful day – and as much fun as your mom and I had getting to the hospital that day – almost didn’t make it in time. Love you, Aunt Min

Well, this was an interesting concept – my mother having FUN on the way to the hospital to give birth to me. My husband and I have five children and while there are many pleasant memories associated with all five births, I don’t recall any real fun trips to the hospital. My mom and Aunt Min always seemed to have a good time whenever they were together, however, so I just had to call my aunt in Pocola and ask for more details. My mother had never told me this story.

“When your mom went into labor with you, she and your dad were living in my little garage apartment behind my house off Towson Avenue (near Mill Creek and Phoenix Mall) on what used to be Fannie Avenue,” Aunt Min told me on the phone. “Your dad worked at the Kroger store on Towson Avenue just a couple of blocks from Sparks Hospital. None of us had a car in those days. We all rode the bus or walked to where we needed to go. So I called Ruth Freeman, who had a beautiful, blue, year-old, 1941 Chevy, and she came and picked us up.

“My mama, your grandmother Kidd, and I got in the back seat and your mother got up front with Ruth. Your mother was having pretty strong labor though, so I told her she should probably switch seats and sit in the back with me, in case she needed to lie down on the way to the hospital. Well, instead of getting out of the car to get in the back seat, she just climbed right over the front seat like she wasn’t even nine months pregnant, in labor and going to have a baby maybe any minute.

“The sight of her hopping over that seat made me start laughing and that got her to laughing and then we couldn’t stop. We laughed so hard all the way to the hospital we thought sure you’d be born in the car,” Aunt Min concluded. “It was a wonderful day.”

Aunt Min’s card and story was just the cure I needed for my birthday blues last year. And this October 24th I’ll have a new birthday memory of my mom to cherish and smile about. Somewhere, in a better place than any of us can even imagine, she’ll be smiling, too. There are no tears in heaven.

Linda Seubold, editor of Entertainment Fort Smith Magazine, can be reached at lindaseubold@efortsmith.com. Read her archived columns and articles online.

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