It’s easy to resent the world for being beautiful if someone you love isn’t here to see it, and you know how much the full moon rising on a January night, or those five extra minutes of daylight falling through winter’s bare trees, meant to them.
My mother loved the physicality of this place. She would pack herself up on the bitterest of nights and go out to the adirondack chair in her back yard to look at the stars. Ok, she’d have a cigarette, too, but it was mostly to look at the stars. (I like that wicked side of her, particularly now that I know she didn’t have lung cancer.) Many a child remembers being on her lap wrapped in a blanket finding The Pleiades.
By her bedside the other day, while my mother slipped farther away, her children and grandchildren started to list the words we know because of her: Love-in-a-Mist, Thalictrum, compost tea. We know how gooseberries dangle like little pink lanterns, currants are impossible to pick, and husk cherries come in paper wrappers. My mother taught me about the fragrance of Daphne and the heartiness of New Dawn roses. I know that daffodils should be planted in clumps, at seemingly random locations, and in such a way that when the winds blow they flutter. Non-fluttering daffodils were a disappointment to my mother.
Somewhere in France years ago my mother saw peasants collecting bundles of twigs into neat packages, and bundling them with red string. Carole came home, and we set out into the woods together with a ball of red string. They were adorable, our kindling bunches.
I cringe at the lights left on in my house, and the non-recyclable baggies in my kids’ lunches, all because of my mother. My brother joked that he could only marry a woman who recycled as well as she did. At the same time, my mother complained that recycling and saving electricity were just more for women to feel guilty about while the environment is really being destroyed by corporate greed.
She loved New England’s snow and she loved the thaw, particularly that first day in March when the woods tinged pink, the very first hint of life running back into the branches. In the bleakest of winter days, my mother would say, “how could anyone leave this for Florida?!”
So, it’s hard to be here in the physical world when she can’t see it anymore. I wish I could make that moon go away.
In lieu of flowers, it would be wonderful if anyone interested in honoring my mother sent a donation to Bread and Roses Soup Kitchen in Lawrence. My mother worked with - and loved - a population of people in Lawrence who often needed this facility.
