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February 16,2021
My Mother’s Voice
This fall Sara and I agreed to face the question of whether or not we can continue to age in place if the place is 29 Columbine Drive, a large house with large gardens. Come spring, we’ll consult a real estate agent and begin to think about options, but we pledged to begin a bit of tossing this winter. If we do move, the less stuff the better.
I have thinned out my file cabinets over the years, but my office closet contains several repositories that are loaded with “treasures”:
my tin animal collection from my years in Canada, neatly preserved in tissue paper and claiming its own box, in which resides as well the wooden fort my brother and I made for the soldiers to fight in;
my gold medals for winning the Indiana state-wide Spanish proficiency contest, twice, which rattle around in my former vanity case, a piece of a luggage set given to me at my high school graduation;
my mother’s favorite ink pen, the one she used to write all her correspondence, the one she didn’t buy but found abandoned in a bank, beige bottomed and silver topped, which sits in its own box on top of a substantial cardboard carton labelled “Earl’s Pear Tomatoes.”
Faithful to my pledge, one day in January I reached into this carton and pulled out a handful of paper. In truth, I did not know what I was going to find. I found my mother’s letters, written in her perfect and lovely hand. I have no memory of having saved her letters.
The plan was this: I would read a letter, enjoy it, and then toss. This would accomplish the stated goal of reducing the “stuff” Sara and I will have to deal with if we move.
The first group of letters I retrieved were written during my two years in Boston, after I graduated from college, when I took a job with the Harvard Business School and then with the American Friends Service Committee. There I could trace my own evolution from a terrified undergraduate to a fairly mature decision-maker, ready to embark on a career.
The second pile, some in envelopes, some loose, were written twenty years later, at another turbulent time in my personal and professional life.
I began bravely, prepared to read a letter and then toss it. I couldn’t. Many were full of important facts about my life, facts that help me to understand now my own behavior then, but it was not information that kept me from tossing. It was hearing my mother’s voice. She could have been sitting on the couch across from my rocker, eating her favorite scone – pecan and maple sugar. And sharing her thoughts.
In a different generation, my mother would have been a professor and a scholar. She attended the University of Chicago, unusual for a woman of her generation, and received a diploma printed on parchment paper and written in Latin, her named rendered Mariam Elisabetham Wilsdon. She chose instead to get married and raise a family, her own birth family having been something of a disaster in her eyes. She would have chosen religion and philosophy, and she would have been a stellar teacher.
The letters bathe me in her love. They let me believe I was a good-enough daughter. This helps to dispel those moments, more frequent with age, when the avenging furies seize me by the throat and scream, “How could you not have . . . “
The evidence of my mother’s love for me is a great comfort. But this is not what stays my hand. It is my mother’s voice, thinking, that I cannot bear to toss.
She took classes and shared her thoughts on what she was reading for “school.” She reflected on everyday events, on the matters of her own life and those of other lives. She read everything I wrote and gave me good criticism. She read books that I just needed a second opinion on before I broached my thoughts to colleagues, she read books that I just wanted to talk about with someone off record.
My mother was tough-minded. She had to make difficult decisions as my father’s dementia slowly began and slowly grew, first to move to Milwaukee to be close to my brother and his family, then to move into a senior residence facility. My father owed the relative comfort of his later life to her keen management of resources and choices.
My mother could be unreasonable, though. I can still hear her striking her cane on the floor for emphasis as she tells me about my father’s refusal to leave their apartment.
“He has the best pair of legs in Laurel Oaks,” she cries, “but will he use them? No!”
“But Mom,” I counter, “he’s scared to death he won’t know how to get back to the apartment if he leaves it. His short-term memory is gone.”
“Nonsense,” says my mother, “he is just being lazy.”
I trace my love of gardening to my mother. In Canada she planted red salvia and orange marigolds along the path to our front door to soften the northern exposure. In Indiana, when she realized – from the change of light, a drop in the temperature, a peculiar greenish-yellow cast to the sky – that a storm was about to descend, she would tear off her apron and race out to tie up the peonies and stake the delphiniums. From my mother I learned that gardening can be difficult, frustrating, full of grief and things you can’t control, but also a way of being in the world so deeply rooted that you would not, indeed could not, give it up. Her letters are filled with stories from the garden.
In my office, on top of a bookcase I can see as I write, I have two photos of my mother that I treasure. One is taken from the time before she was married and a mother, when she was Mary and a camp counselor. She is wearing a dowdy swimming suit and her hair is wild, but she is laughing. I feel sure we would have been friends if I had been at that camp.
The second was taken in the last year of her life, at 93. She is standing outside on the porch of her apartment in Laurel Oaks. She is turned toward the camera and smiling. With one hand she draws down out of its hanging basket a long stem of plant; in the other she holds a pair of tiny clippers that I gave her several years ago so that she could better tend her “garden.” I realize now that her smile is triumphant; she is saying to the world, “Look, I am still gardening.”
I am conversing now, pretty much every day, with my mother. From the size of the carton in my office, it looks like this conversation will continue for some time.
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