My mother, Alice Potts, died peacefully last month in her memory-care assisted-living apartment in Salina, Kansas. She was 81 years old, and had in recent years been dealing with dementia (which was compounded of late by cerebral hemorrhages).
Mom grew up the oldest of six on a farm near the town of Aliceville in eastern Kansas. She was always a kind, resourceful, and independent soul. When she made the cheerleading team her junior year and couldn’t afford a uniform, she got a job mowing the local cemetery. When she got into junior college and couldn’t afford the fees, she worked for a year as a teller at the local bank to save up tuition money. She was the first person in her family to attend college.
Alice eventually earned a degree in elementary education, and moved to Wichita, where she met and married a (very lucky to have met her) high school biology teacher named George Potts. “Mrs. Potts” spent 35 years teaching second grade at OK Elementary School. In 1994 she coordinated her students’ successful campaign to make the Barred Tiger Salamander the Kansas State Amphibian (a feat that earned her the Kansas Wildlife Federation’s “Wildlife Conservationist of the Year” Award).
Accomplishments aside, her love of learning (and of the natural world) was infectious. Two generations of elementary students came to remember mom’s classroom fondly — for her exuberant and fair-minded teaching style, her colorful menagerie of animals, and her loving embrace of what can be possible in life for children who come to value wonder, curiosity, and respect for other people.
Two of her most devoted students were most certainly my sister Kristin and me, and we owe much of our own interest in teaching and writing (and being curious about the world in general) to her. When we were young, she got us into long-distance running, as well as bicycling (in 1985 we cheered as she completed the 540-mile Bike Across Kansas), and attending St. Andrews Lutheran church with her and our dad.
Mom didn’t have a passport until she was 54 years old (the age I am now), but she proved to be a natural traveler as she explored places as close as to home as Kansas, Colorado, and New York — and as far from home as Paris, Prague, Busan, Beijing, and Mongolia.
In her retirement, mom moved with dad to a rural stretch of Saline County, not far from her young grandsons, where she enjoyed gardening, tending to her dogs/cats/goats/cows, and spending time with her family. I count it as one of life’s greatest blessings that, in adulthood, she and my dad were my next-door neighbors for the better part of 20 years.
At the beginning of 2020 my mom told me that her resolutions for the new year were:
1) Practice kindness.
2) Embrace forgiveness.
3) Be thankful.
I hope we all can honor her legacy by doing those very things.
PS: Five years ago, when mom was 76 years old, I interviewed her alongside my father George about parental mortality, and how they dealt with losing their own parents. Now as much as ever, it is a conversation worth listening to.
Also worth listening to, in the context of my mom’s life and how she lived it, are these two podcast interviews about her travels with dad to China and Mongolia in 2001, and to Paris and Prague in 2007.
