Violets

Just about a year ago now, I received this note in response to a column I wrote for Mothers Day.  No words that I could add or bookending remarks that I could possibly add to it to make it any more meaningful than it is already.Here then the letter from Pattie Wesley of Woodbury Connecticut.“This is my first mother's day in almost 65 years without my mom.  She died in January, just shy of 88.“It is my first spring without her. She loved spring.“This is my fist violet and dandelion season without her.“As a young girl, I would run out on the morning of mother's day and pick violets and dandelions to fill the construction paper pocket I made for her.“She loved it.“When I first returned to this part of the world 26 years ago, I went out one day in my parents' yard, picked violets and brought them in to her. She burst into tears."’You always brought me the violets," she said.“This is the first spring since, that I have not been able to hand her the violets.“My mother was in the geriatric unit at Bridgeport Hospital for more than a month before she died. The nurses would tell me she kept asking, ‘Where is my mother?’ apparently not a good thing to hear from an old person.“Indeed, one day when I walked into her room, she was asking the nurse, ‘Where is my mother?’“The nurse said, ‘Jane, your mother is not with us.’“Looking straight at me, standing in the doorway, she said, 'She's right there.'“I do not think my mom thought I was her mother. “I think she lost the word daughter.“I think she knew, after years of holding me, that I was now holding her."And so she was. She held one parent and then she held the other as I learned just now when I wrote to Pattie to ask of I might share this tale:"I do want you to know that my dad, closer to 98 than 97, died in October of 2013, after my mom died in January. He was doing okay until we buried my mom in March on her birthday. Then he slipped down hill. His sweetheart was gone and he died, 24 hours after my brother and sister in law had said good bye and 30 minutes after I told him I loved him for the last time.“They were excellent human beings and the best parents. I miss them every day and I don't wish them back. Each, in his or her own way was ready to go. Their children are the luckiest people in the world.”As I said at the outset, no words that I could add…. No  bookending remarks except a word of thanks to you, Pattie, on behalf of us all.        

A Nice Day

Mothers Day was good. I didn't dine out like this crazed person. I had way more fun than any poor sap forced to sit up straight  in a restaurant for two hours. What I did rather was to lie in the bed until 8,  just watching my dreams go by. (Did you know Bob Dylan came to my house for dinner? And he LIKES burned broccoli?) Then I wrote about my mom and I worked on the week’s column which has to go out by noon today. I read a book about Robert Frost. His poor father died at 35 of tuberculosis. (At 35!)  Once, so desperate to find healing, he resorted to a folk remedy: went with young 'Robbie' to the stockyards and drank down two whole cups of fresh blood collected from the slit throat of a just-slaughtered calf.He died anyway,Instead of blood I drank my signature blend of mint tea and lemonade that my grandchildren call ‘TT juice’  in honor of my name. (To Old Dave and these two little boys I am and always will be ‘TT.’) Then I went to the market because I had offered to make dinner for those grandchildren and their parents, who had had kind of a tough week. We traipsed over to their place where I broiled up salmon, scallops and swordfish, roasted a small orchard of asparagus, tossed together two fat corsages of that funny hydroponic lettuce, baked a pound cake, sliced up strawberries the size of hand grenades and made for the little guys a platter of gooey grilled cheese sandwiches and a couple of bowls of buttery pasta.The rest was the usual stuff:  kitchen chaos,  super hero action, ear exams, and a little shirts-vs.skins....Later as we sat in their living room we could just hear Chris’s murmuring voice as she read the boys from the night’s book. We talked quietly for a while when she came back down and by 10pm we four were  back here in our own beds.It was a nice day all right, topped off by the fact that our two new housemates gave me a bouquet of gorgeous individually picked flowers as well as a fresh tower of brand-new snap-together Tupperware for all the food we make between us every day. :-)

A Pack of Smokes at the Pearly Gates

Mothers Day was so easy once but it's all different now. Once you could just go outside and hunt around around 'til you found  a few apple blossoms, which you jammed into the crotch of a clothespin, swaddled  in soggy Kleenex and wrapped in tinfoil, just because tinfoil was so pretty. Then you just had to set it next to your mom's place at the breakfast table where she could enjoy looking at it while she took that bracing drag on the day's first cigarette. 

That’s how it was in my house anyway, long before the time when motherhood got all soaked in Clorox and sanitized. These days a mother is  supposed to be this purring and approving presence, building SELF ESTEEM in her young every minute.I knew my mother loved me - fiercely even - but she didn’t hand out compliments just to make me feel good about myself. When I got to the finals of the big annual Spelling Bee, then told her how I'd fallen down on the word ‘tongue’ she yelled, “You misspelled ‘TONGUE’?! Can you spell ‘LIP’?"I wasn’t hurt by the remark because I understood her, in the way that the second child often 'gets' the mother. Even as an 11-year-old I got it that her life had brought her heartache and that my being the best little speller in the city might somehow ease her pain.  I liked the way she was, strong and outspoken. I even liked it that she had a temper; and I didn’t mind that she smoked in a closed car. It was good knowing how human and  flawed she was; it made me feel better about my own shortcomings. Plus she never smothered me the way parents do nowadays.I miss her a lot. But I smile every time I look at this picture, taken that night in her 59th year when she came home after a week in the hospital with a  shattered pelvis and was still facing at least another couple of weeks in bed, which is how they did it in those days, never mind teh current method of trotting you around the corridors with your IV's from the surgery clanking along beside you.Her two sisters and her brother were there in the room as I was. Also my sister Nan, even sitting on the bed with Mom. I like that too, that she's sitting on the bed. The aunts and uncles were all drinking whiskey. So was our mother, as you can see, and she had that favored pack of cigs right handy too. Ah Cal Sheehy, born Caroline Theresa Sullivan! Here's to you, you cheerful soul who raised two cheerful daughters all alone. I hope they have Camels in heaven.