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. :-)

cool hands soft

It was a nice Mothers Day for me. My girls gave me plants and our first honorary son and his bride sent some gorgeous flowers and called - twice.  A certain young man from Brooklyn forgot to call but we’re not much on these things in our family so that’s fine  - and maybe this evens us out finally for that time I stole a photo of him from one if his friends’ Facebook pages and used it in the holiday card.

The truth is, it was  a long day for me and my back muscles were screaming bloody murder by 6pm, probably because I began the day by driving 3 ½ hours, then food-shopped, then picked up a boy so he could harvest some blossoms from our yard to give to his honorary mom. (And what an eye for beauty he has as the vaseful showed, the azalea and lilac, the rhododendron and bridal veil all so artfully arranged by him!) Then I roasted a couple of pork loins before the rest of them arrived with the side dishes and David produced a 1990 wine just on the edge of turning from awesome to dirt-like.

Of course I thought of my own mom as I do every day, since, except for a sharp yearning for the sound of her voice, she is not gone from me at all, even these 22 years after her death. But for some reason I thought more of David's mom who lies at last beside her young husband, cut down in the prime of his life. Ruth Payne was soft-spoken and self-effacing, tolerant, free-thinking, and humble. This is what she looked like her senior year at Tufts when she was futilely trying to tell one Ralph Marotta a marriage between them would never work.. And this below is the poem that since her death has made me think of her every time I read it. Emily Dickinson wrote it about her own mother who she too missed very much, even as we all miss the ones who gave us life, remembering as we do our baby days and their cool hand soft upon our brow:

She bore it till the simple veinsTraced azure on her hand --Til pleading, round her quiet eyesThe purple Crayons stand.

Till Daffodils had come and goneI cannot tell the sum,And then she ceased to bear it --And with the Saints sat down.

No more her patient figureAt twilight soft to meet --No more her timid bonnetUpon the village street --

But Crowns instead, and Courtiers --And in the midst so fair,Whose but her shy -- immortal faceOf whom we're whispering here?

but seriously: who could be mad at this guy?

Mothers Day Post-Mortem

When my sister and I were kids, Mothers Day meant sneaking outside at dawn in our pjs, picking blossoms, glomming them together with electrician’s tape, wrapping them in tinfoil because tinfoil was of course so pretty, then impaling the whole top-heavy thing on a hat-pin and presenting it to our mom. She’d pretend to be surprised and would never get mad about the grass satins on our pajama-bottoms or the tree-bark clinging to the great lifting cloud of my curly black hair (talk about biscuit head, which even today my spouse calls “The Net”.)

I got one card for Mothers Day, from the dazzling couple shown here. That’s our Favorite Oldest Son (as he calls himself) Dodson, the first-in honorary kid in our big shambling family, Dodson who came to us back in ‘86 as a barely five-foot-tall freshman in the ABC Program and that’s his bride Veronica. They sent me flowers AND a card AND called yesterday. And I heard from three of our other honorary children too, darling Susie and handsome Gary and Deanna whom I met when she was 18 and now seems like a lovely pale lily of a younger sister to me.

So they got in touch. And I got to actually see all my girls because I invited them over and made salmon and swordfish and roast beef, rice and a salad of Boston lettuce, strawberries and goat cheese in walnut oil. Carrie's my oldest girl. She and her partner Chris brought their two shorties who got right to work dismantling the place. And my younger daughter Annie came straight from the airport and four days in Chicago. Our youngest, Michael, living above a dry cleaners in East Harlem I did not hear from but poor Mike: him I will hunt down in a hour to proof my column which has to go out this morning. Michael edits everything I write and has done so since his Junior year in high school and if you ever find a typo here you’ll know he didn’t see it first. Each week he takes my column, a mere 620 words long and he sits with it for a good 15 minutes, finding the stray grammatical goof-up or the logical lapse, pointing out the turn of phrase that is awkward or that repeats or that has become in his mind an annoying verbal tic of mine and who knows more about those than a person’s own kids? Annie looks at my work too I should say and Carrie as well and these poor kids: when I die they’ll say, “Thank God! Silence at last!”

So anyway the baby and I patted the cat and his pre-school brother and I went out to my car and pushed buttons to make the doors and windows open and close so many times the things began to resemble a big gilled sea-creature breathing hard. Then with supper we drank a Frei Brothers Chardonnay and a Hess Select Merlot. Chris, who is Carrie’s partner and as dear to me now as my own child started with wine, but then switched to beer. We talked about doing childcare for them in two weeks when they go to an out-of-town wedding and Annie told about eating at the finest restaurant in Chicago. Carrie and I also spent some time studying pictures of our family from over 100 years ago and she again said how she wanted to go out to the Berkshires and see that old old house where our family story started.

They say Michael looks just like me. Annie looks like her own gorgeous self and is her own bold and funny self too. But the more I look at this first child Carrie, the more she looks to me in moments like my own mom and also like the pictures of Mom’s mom who died as a girl barely 30. If it were now instead of 1910 she might not have even been pregnant by that age. As it was she’d been pregnant five times and the fifth pregnancy killed her. Here they are now, the daughter I know so well and the grandmother we none of us knew, Carrie Maloney, married in 1903, and Carrie Marotta, married 100 years later, almost to the day. You tell me they don’t look alike.

I think of that young dead woman. I picture her often lying there just a few feet down below the grave I visit. Alas and alas I now also picture my mom, who lies there too at the feet of the mother she could never remember.

It got late fast last night and I was too sleepy to write. So let me just say this morning thanks, guys, for making me a mom. And thank you, husband of mine, for doing all the dishes and drying them; for putting them away and wiping the counter-tops same as you do every time. And finally thanks to you, Mom, and here you are as a newlywed of 38, pregnant with her first child before the troubles came that rendered you single again, but even then this is what I remember: you with your big smile, telling it like it was and making everyone laugh.