Mom, surrounded by five of our six children: Clockwise, from  bottom  left -- Ambryn, Bill, Mikell, Matt, Andy.  Ben was at work in Mankato.

Karen Alma Melius

On Saturday, August 25, 2012, we buried my mother, Karen Alma Melius.  Mom had died a week earlier, August 19, at the Winthrop Good Samaritan Center.  She was 86.

Most of those years were good ones for Mom.  But not the last weeks.  Certainly not the last days.  I was ready for Mom to go.  That’s no way to live, no way to die.  That’s what I would tell family, friends, co-workers.

But I don’t think Mom saw it that way.  She wanted to keep living. I could tell. Her smile each day told me.  She told me.  Mom wasn’t ready to die.  I asked her.

“No. I’ve got more people to talk to,” she told me during her last week.  And she smiled, again. 

Mom  didn’t talk much in her final weeks.  She was unable to get out of bed.  She didn’t eat much, if anything.  But she still liked ice cream.  She always did, whether it was a Buster Bar at the Dairy Queen, or a sundae cone out of the grocery store freezer.  Those were among her treats.  And they were always better if she had one with her kids or her grandkids or her great-grandkids.

That was Mom’s life, that and Lyle’s Café.  Her younger sister, Marge Saxton Lindstrand, owned this Winthrop landmark for almost 50 years.  Mom  worked there the entire time, baking thousands of pies, quietly accepting the fact that a 94-year-old Pie Lady, Mina Peterson, got the first and biggest headlines in the mid-‘80s. 

Mom  loved Mina and worked side-by-side with this legend for decades.  But Mom’s pies were better and more numerous.  I remember a postcard from  a New York traveler who made a regular passage through Minnesota because he had found the best sour cream  raisin pie he’d ever tasted. From  New York, through Winthrop, Minnesota, en route to California!

I remember generations of families from  the Marshall area who would make Lyle’s Café their midway stop on the way to the Twin Cities.  That Hwy. 19 traffic, to and from  the Cities, helped make the legend of the Pie Lady and Lyle’s Café grow.  This little, 75-seat café on the corner of Winthrop’s stoplight was a proud fixture of this community for decades.  And it was a simple place where generations of Winthrop people loved to work.

“We had one of the best working together relationships any two people could possibly have,” remembered Gloria Kuehn, a fellow Lyle’s pie baker. “She was also a very, very dear friend and I have many wonderful memories of the times we spent together.”

Gloria was one of the lucky ones who learned some of Mom’s pie-baking tricks of the trade.  Mom  had no recipes, much to the chagrin of her family.  She just baked the pies by memory.  She swore her only real secret was using home-rendered lard for her crusts.  But there was so much more to that.  I would watch amazed as she took hours slow-cooking her raisins for the sour cream  raisin pie, puffing them  up just so.  And the meticulous way she lathered up her meringues, then spun them  just right for a look no one else could make. 

It all seemed so simple.  But few people could match her talents.  Gloria was one of the lucky ones Mom  taught.  Chris Smith, a fellow co-owner of  Lyle’s during the late ‘80s and ‘90s with me, was another.  Maybe that’s why it was those two who finally brought my tears during Mom’s funeral.  These were the pie bakers.  And Mom  was truly the Pie Lady.

As Chris and Kelly Smith walked up to Peace Lutheran Church, I cried for the first time over Mom’s death.  We had spent little time together through the past years, as the Smiths left the restaurant business as Kelly went into high school administration.  But as they approached, it was easy to recall how special those times had been.  How much simpler and different the world was, even just 20-25 years earlier.

An even earlier generation of Winthropites can share their stories, as well, of a Lyle’s Café that was the gathering place of Winthrop High School students after game days and nights.  Lyle’s Café was a vintage piece of Americana, but it was Winthrop’s place.

But that sense of community is forever altered when one finally says goodbye to his parents.  My dad, Louis “Pud” Melius, died April 14, 2009, at the age of 93.  Their home for all of my 55 years was at 410 North Hennepin Street in Winthrop.  I was both lucky and cursed to have lived just a block and a half away for the past 30 years. 

That’s close enough to have once looked out our picture window during a heavy snowfall and seeing my mother towing our toboggan with two loads of our laundry back to her place.  She had snuck in our house while I was shoveling snow in back, then whisked away knowing I’d be upset with her.  I was, at the time, and raced outside to catch her. 

“Just bored and trying to help you out,” Mom  said then.  I slowly learned to let her help. It’s what she wanted to do, help her kids.  It’s now part of Mom  and Dad’s legacy.  Despite limited means, they helped out whenever they could.  They rarely gave advice from  their parental chairs, but they would listen and provide support as each knew best.

But most of all, Mom  and Dad remained proud of their family and proud of their community.  Mom  gave her all to Lyle’s Café and her family.  Dad’s employment days at the old Midland station were proud ones, but his “retirement” and work at the Winthrop golf course were his golden times.  And both loved plopping down lawn chairs along the third-base line to watch the local town team  baseball games.

My parents’ journey together was a simple one.  So was their message.  “Be kind to others, be fair, and love your family.”

So I am  and I do.