Scenes of a Mom

Scenes of a Mom

A start of surprise ran down my mother’s rigid body as I flung my five-year-old arms around her waist. My loyal playmate Blackie, a black and white cat who let me dress him in a baby bonnet and parade him around the yard in a baby carriage, had been run down on the long, straight road many used as a speedway and that abutted our long driveway.

We were not a hugging family. Stepping back, my mother offered neither words of comfort nor disapproval of my tears. She bundled me into the family car and took me out to dinner, just the two of us, my first experience of loss marked with the proper weight of solemn importance.

My mother shooed us outside and this day forgot to lock the door against constant childish demands. She stood in the middle of the living room, yardstick in hand, and conducted to a classical record playing on our record player that looked like a suitcase. She noticed me, standing in the doorway, mouth open, and the yardstick drifted down to her side. Face red, she asked what I wanted. I felt bad interrupting her pretend time but was delighted that, even though a grownup, she still found time to play. It’s one of my favorite lessons.

In all but the most extreme weather, my mother stood weekend after weekend under an awning, behind a rented table filled with her shelves of cats, dogs, and clowns made from fuzzy yarns, which she sold at New Jersey’s Englishtown Flea Market, the largest market on the east coast. Mom had gone back to work, after we three kids entered school, as a third-shift aide at a rest home where she finally found a few hours of peace and quiet to dream and create. She took orders and produced people’s beloved pets from photographs or matched the color of crocheted tissue covers topped by her unique animal or clown heads to their décor. My mother saved enough from this second job to send two kids to college and to buy my parents’ retirement home.

Mom recently moved to a lovely house renovated into an assisted-living facility where attendants wheel her to musical programs, word games, church services, and meals. I had for a time cared for her, doing her laundry, supervising her medicines, taking her shopping. I no longer have to do any of those things and I miss it, miss the daily contact. Yet I know this is the last scene of my mother’s life and she is living it as suits her stubbornly independent spirit while giving her children one more life lesson.