Walking through life without you a phone call, email, or road trip away, I find myself mesmerized by your love of life and your salt of the earth needs and desires. People tend to remember others as saints after they die, and I know just how disgusted you would be if you thought I'd speak of you in such a contrived, superficial manner. You would laugh and say something like, "oh, yes, I am your sainted mother" in the holiest of tones.
That said, the image of you that I carry from a magical, clumsy childhood, as an obnoxious, out of control teenager, and through the eyes of a disillusioned, stumbling adult, is one of warmth and a love that cannot be expressed in words. Your image in my mind and in my soul is one of genuine, complete, and imperfectly perfect humanity. I know what it means to smile on the inside and I feel it every time I see one of your favorite things.
You were thrilled by the color the sky turns and the way the clouds move right before a storm... just as the last of the humid air gets swept away by a changing wind.
Chester, the yellow lab on the corner of East Hill Road and Gracey, always gives Dad the most love and affection, but you were the one who sought him out and called his name on long walks.
You loved our small town and would have lived there happily for a thousand more years... on the top of a mountain where no one delivers pizza and every bicycle ride starts on a terrific slope and ends with a tired push of the handlebars.
When Jeff and I were young you would make us pancakes for dinner when Dad went on business trips and tell us to never let you get too serious, or we'd have to remind you to "live a little".
There was nothing like a nap after work on the worn out couch with a worn out old comforter or our Christmas night campouts under the tree between opened presents and balled up paper and bows.
Even after you fractured your ankle on Jeff's "killer bee" skateboard going down the driveway, you insisted on showing me how you could jump up and click your ankles together twice on that icy walk in the dead of winter... and still laughed about it in the Emergency Room afterward as they taped that same right ankle.
Although the idea of having house guests made your hair stand on end with anxiety, you always said as they were leaving that we should have people over more often.
And the hamsters, rabbits, and pets we begged you for growing up always ended up in your care and somewhere deep in your heart... like the hamster with gangrene that you took to the vet for 48 stitches only to die the next day, or the turtle I caught that you set free after putting me to bed because you couldn't stand to think of it out there in its box all night.
These are the things that I think about and remember most from day to day... the littlest things that made you smile... fresh sheets from the clothesline, swimming out past the waves in the ocean, walking barefoot through the yard and across the broken brick walkway to the front door... washing and waxing your first and only new car (that is now mine) in the driveway, eating the best cheeseburger on the island with me in Chincoteague for days in a row, staying in your PJ's until noon and making us the world's best sourdough pancakes...
Most of all, you loved us. We were your favorite things and you told us and showed us quite often. At the end of the day, when I hear the "All Things Considered" music and smell my own dinner cooking, it is not the memory of the past that resonates as much as it is the awareness of a love so withstanding and so breathtakingly perfect that it will forever be in my present.
No comments:
Post a Comment