momma

My mother has taught me one million lessons, all of them still unfolding, as they will forever. Many of them are ripe with emotion, her Cancer sun soaking life in nostalgia, casting feelings of ancestral importance on the world I walk through. Life is about more than what we can see, and my mom taught me how to listen for the rhythms of love beating below the surface. There are many ways to tap into the tune.

On mother’s day I take a long walk, and sit in nature. I stare at the green canopies, allowing the sounds of swaying leaves to soothe the subtle ache in my heart. I spend the day alone, allowing time to unfold, holding space for whispers from other realms. Mom used to say that she never got bored.

I try not to let the melancholy sitting on my bones make itself too comfortable, as I clean the kitchen and dance to Billie Eilish and Purity Ring and other artists that stir up that certain dark feeling. Just as I am about to give up on shaking the heavies away, it occurs to me to call my Grandma Dory, my Dad’s mom. As soon as she answers, she is absolutely raving about a speaker that my Dad gifted her. “I can listen to my music on the deck, in the basement, anywhere!!” She muses over Michael Buble, and George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. She then proceeds to gas me up for a solid 15 minutes, poignantly reminding me of the gifts I hold. She reflects on how she grew up, and how much less freedom there was to explore your passions, especially as a woman. “NEVER lose sight of what you want to do, baby.” Her matter of fact way of speaking is fiery like her red nails, her zest for life at 78 years old bright and rich, like her Martha Stewart Fiesta dishes. I thank her sooo much, we say our I love yous, and I feel like I have been showered in sweet courage.

As it starts to get dark, I light the beeswax candle that sits in an old mead bottle, blue glass and dancing bears. Listening to Cat Stevens now, a favorite of Mom’s and her Dad’s, Tuesday’s Dead brings a sense of joy and buoyant groove. As I float around my room, I pause in front of the tiny altar on my windowsill. A photo of Mom standing on a roof, holding a Natty Ice, smiling her face blossoming smile. Her hair is softly pulled back in one of the big clips that she always used, and she is wearing leopard print sandals with a slight heel. The pièce de résistance is her hot pink Jimmy Buffet shirt, with a big green parrot in the center. I think back to 2018, on the way to Harry Potter world to celebrate my brother’s graduation from high school. Mom was deep in her illness at the time, but she was still moving her bad self and singing along to Margaritaville in the car.

I take a deep breath, and feel strong enough to open the door. I carefully unfold one of the letters that she wrote to me, dated 9/25/18. On the borders of one page she has painted blue, light pink, orange, and green flowers in acrylic paint. On the second page, a green, blue and pink vine, as well as a swirling sort of firework looking thing, of different shades of blue and pink. She describes with detail and excitement the storm she is watching from our front porch, sitting with my dad and candles. She references Pet Cemetery; “It’s a South-Wester, though. I mean ‘west-ah’.” She jokes about the “DVD for old people” that she bought, where the instructor lady encourages using all of your muscles in the seated workout. “Seems logical”, she writes.

She is excited about my Dad building a pond in the backyard, with a waterfall, plants, shale rock, and of course little things/people interspersed between the rock. I laugh and admire my own windowsill, fit with a smiling cat figurine, a plastic crab, sea shells, and geodes.

After a few tears, I respond to her letter in my journal. I describe everything that is happening in my life in vivid detail; the new people I have met and what they are like, my new job at a greenhouse and how wonderful it is to work with living things every day, the eggs that I bought at the farmer’s market that ended up having a double yolk. I can feel how curious she would be about all of it.

Watching my mom slowly slip from this life was truly heartbreaking, and I will always be uncovering new lessons from the experience. What I am most grateful for is the capacity for connection that she passed down to me. Because of this, I still feel connected to her each day. Before she left, we shared many mornings of connection in our kitchen nook, drinking coffee and listening to Neil Young. She always stressed the importance of family; we would visit Grampy once a week, often venturing out to a metropark where he would tell us the names of all of the birds and flowers that surrounded us. Grammy got a visit once a week as well, at her nursing home where Mom would take one of the other residents, Ann, on walks around the large kitchen table. Mom was just, connected. She knew who to indulge new connections with, and who to avoid. She knew when it was time to sit in a lounge chair in the backyard for a few hours, simply taking in the sun. She was happiest with nights of playing euchre as a family, or bonfires in the backyard. Always a sense of earthy, pink warmth. Always a sense of each moment being important. When I start to feel boredom, or a sense of giving up creeping in on me, I tap into my mom’s energy- or perhaps it is simply ‘mother energy’- and remember the endless possibilities, the never ending rhythms constantly surrounding us, quietly waiting for us to join in on the jam session.