The Porch Light Still Glows ( today I miss my mom)

Today, I miss my mom.

There’s nothing significant about the date. It’s not Mother’s Day, not her birthday, not even the anniversary of her passing. It’s just a regular Thursday in May, the kind of day she used to call “good porch-sitting weather.” The kind of day she’d pour two glasses of sweet tea and say, “Come sit with me for a spell.”

She’s been gone for almost four years now, but grief doesn’t care about the calendar. It shows up when it wants—softly, suddenly, and without warning. Today, it showed up in the middle of my lunch break, when I spotted her favorite sunflowers blooming by the fence.

I grew up in a small town in Kentucky, where the summers are sticky and the people wave when they pass you on the road. Mom was the heart of our home—always baking, always humming Patsy Cline, always reminding me to say “please” and “thank you” and “don’t forget to write your grandma a thank-you note.” She taught me how to balance a checkbook, how to drive on gravel roads, and how to fry chicken the right way.

Losing her was like losing the axis my world spun on.

Cancer stole her from us slowly. I spent the last few months of her life driving down from Louisville every weekend, praying the weather would hold, dreading every new symptom. She was tough though. Even when she could barely keep her eyes open, she made sure I was eating, I was sleeping. On the night before she passed, she reached for my hand and whispered, “Keep your porch light on for me, okay?”

It was such a strange thing to say. But I nodded, and I do. Every single night.

Today, I was dusting the bookshelf when I found one of her old recipe cards wedged inside a novel. Her handwriting stopped me cold—perfect loops of blue ink, stained with grease spots from years of use. It was her banana bread recipe, the one she made every Christmas morning. I ran my finger over the words like they were Braille, like touching them would bring her back.

I sat down right there on the floor and cried. Not the loud kind—just quiet, aching tears that rolled down my cheeks without asking permission. Because sometimes, no matter how strong you’ve been, you just need your mom. And mine is gone.

But here’s the thing about mothers: they don’t ever really leave.

I see her in the way I sing to my own daughter at bedtime, in the way I always carry extra napkins in the car, in the way I insist on making everything from scratch on Thanksgiving. She’s in my stubbornness. My laughter. The way I hug a little too tight. She’s in my bones.

Grief is not a straight line. It circles back around when you least expect it—when you’re folding laundry, when a certain song comes on the radio, when the sky looks just the way it did the day she left. But I’ve learned to make room for it. To honor it. Because grief is just love with nowhere to go.

So today, I miss my mom. I miss her fiercely. But I’ll make her banana bread tonight. I’ll sip sweet tea on the porch as the sun sets. And I’ll leave the light on, just like she asked. Because some part of me believes she’s still finding her way home.

Grief never truly leaves us—it changes, softens, and reshapes itself into memories, recipes, and the quiet habits we carry forward. Missing my mom isn't just about sadness; it's about remembering the depth of her love and the pieces of her that live on in my everyday life.

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