Ever smiling, ever gentle on my mind
Vignettes of my mother
I have so many lovely memories of my mother, and I know how lucky that makes me in a world fraught with sadness and disappointment. I am overwhelmingly grateful for my mom. I’m thinking of how she got up early in the mornings to wash dishes from the night before (my parents still don’t have a dishwasher), how she made us popcorn in the afternoons after me crying over my math lessons, and all the long walks we took with the dogs on the hill behind our house.
I grow a garden because my mom always did, and I learned from her how important it is to feed your family good food. I probably read as much as I do because she read to us when we were little, planting the seed that grew into a love of literature, a seed that keeps on growing year after year.
As I’ve grown up and left for college, come home, left again, and traveled to and fro for several years, I felt my parents’ generosity even more deeply in how they always let me return to their house as a home base. They fed me, listened to my stories, and offered me so much love. When I think about my mother’s hospitality in their home, I always think of the lyrics to the Glen Campbell song Gentle on My Mind:
It's knowing that your door is always open
And your path is free to walk
That makes me tend to leave my sleeping bag
Rolled up and stashed behind your couch.
My mother is genuinely the most generous person I know. She made life abundantly fun and interesting for my sisters and me as we were growing up, and she continues to love us so well now that we are grown and all moved to different states, starting families and gardens of our own.
I could write down so many stories about life with my mom. I wrote down just a few over these last few days, thinking of the upcoming Mother’s Day, when we celebrate mothers all and everything they mean to us.
***
There are giant black and white cows all around me, and I am terrified.
An old man is talking to my mother. He wears overalls and a newsboy cap, just like Farmer Hoggett on Babe. When I was this little, I thought he was Farmer Hoggett. He is the farmer from whom my mother buys milk, and we are in his barn.
I am four, maybe three, and I feel smaller than I ever have when I’m around these cows. They are big, hulking, noisy beasts with tails like heavy ropes that swing back and forth, and they will hit me if I get too close. The noise of them makes me think of being on Noah’s ark, with all the animals in the world crowded around me. It’s so loud I can’t think. There is the noise of the pipeline, too, chugging and pumping along over our heads. It must be milking time.
We are here to pick up our milk. The farmer lives down the road from us in a big orange brick house. He milks Holsteins, and he sells my mother raw milk straight from the holding tank. Milk has never come from the grocery store; it comes from these awful, terrifying creatures.
I stay close to Mama because I don’t want to get kicked by the bony legs, or sniffed by the curious snouts, or lost amid so many huge bodies. This might be the only time I’ve gone to the barn with her, or it might be the tenth time — all I remember is the thunderous noise of all the cows groaning and the security of my mother’s closeness. It’s that same security that draws me to her bedside after I’ve had a bad dream, like a magic circle nothing can penetrate. Except it’s not magic; it’s just Mama. She won’t let these enormous creatures harm me.
***
I am at college, and it’s the dreary dead of winter. In the North Country, the winters can sometimes close in on you and start to crush you so that you can't see their beauty up close. I am supposed to go to a ladies’ dinner at the church tonight. I’ve promised my friends, but I am deep in one of those moods where everything sounds trifling and everybody around me is getting on my nerves. It’s because I’m lonely, and so I call my mom.
Would she come and visit me, and we could brave the ladies’ Christmas dinner together? An hour and a half’s drive separates my snowy little town from my parent’s house. My mom makes no promises just then, the weather being typical of December in New York. The next day she sends me a text — “Mr. H. and I are on our way.”
My mom and my dog arrive, Mama in her cowboy boots and Henley on his best behavior. This is just one of the times she has made tracks through the snow to come to me when I need her, or just when I want her. I want her to listen to me wail about boys, troubles with friendships, and how insecure I feel about my college classes.
“You’d be good at this,” she told me after she learned about the court reporting program at the state school in the woods. I trusted her judgement; I had no better plan, anyway. She took me to visit, helped me apply, and made it sound exciting. Then she came to visit me whenever I felt about to drown, making two years of turbulent change altogether a smoother ride.
Now she’s in my apartment, playing the piano that sits by the window while I make us breakfast. Henley rests his head on his paws beside the piano bench. Mama plays scales like waterfalls and meandering made-up melodies. She doesn’t use any sheet music. The sound brings my nerves back into shape from being stretched out too thin, and I know it’s a good thing I didn’t go to college in the desert in California.
***
“At least it’s not Alaska.” This is her response when I tell her I’ve decided I’m moving to Ohio. I’ve been putting off telling her, but it can’t wait any longer. In just a few days I’m leaving for my first visit to the farm. We are on the highway, headed eastward to pick up 25 broiler chicks that my friend is keeping for me.
Mama takes the news gracefully. She must be used to similar pieces of news by this point — for the last four years now I’ve been presenting ideas to her about places I want to go. I have gotten no plenty of times, and sometimes I have gone anyway. In a few years, when I am older and have gathered more perspective, maybe I will understand better why the thought of her daughter traveling across the country by herself would justly cause a mother some concern.
But this is only Ohio. Compared to Alaska, it’s just down the road.
It’s a few weeks later, and we are loading the same chickens, bigger and uglier now, into crates and into my parent’s truck. I’ve taken the job in Ohio, and Mama is helping me move, chickens and all.
On our arrival we are met by dogs, children, and all manner of poultry fowl. They flap and squawk at us by way of greeting. I set myself to unloading my things from my parents’ truck so that Mama can be on her way again and get back home before dark. When I step outside from my new home, a fifth-wheel camper, my mom is sitting in the shade of a tree with the farm pup stretched out by her side, stroking her soft black coat. I tell her this place will be good for me — I think. We are both feeling the heaviness of goodbye.
Mama grew up around cows. While she was in nursing school, she milked the evening shift at her neighbors’ dairy and came home smelling of cow spit and milk stains. I think of all ways I want to be like her — putting her children’s needs above her own, cooking good food, noticing the funny things about everyday life, taking care of her own parents as they aged and passed on. Milking cows is just another one of the ways I am like her. I think that maybe someday I’ll get to help my daughter move into her own place, and be gracious about that, too, even if it makes me a little teary.
***
“But she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”
~ Willa Cather, My Antonia
For each of us, our life began with our mother. I count it a tremendous blessing to have my own mother as my very dear friend. Her job has not been easy, but she has shown me what being faithful looks like.
Much love to all the mothers who may be reading this — your work carries eternal significance! And a special hug and kiss to mine.
