A Prayer to My Mom on
Mother’s Day 2018—the 27th since she passed away.
Mom, you made the best
damn berry pie and apple crisp that this earth, and your oldest son this
earthling, have ever known…and will ever!
All winter long our Sunday dinners of pot roast and the infamous ‘grease
potatoes’ were topped off by homemade desserts, fresh out of the oven, usually
pie(s) of some sort, often ala’ mode ….and you always made two!
(At least that’s how I choose
to remember) One entire pie for brother Chris and I, the other for the rest of
the family and whoever else might have graced our dining room table that
afternoon to fight over. Stuffed, grinning and semi-comatose after dinner was
our lot in life on Sundays. Not a bad fate, thanks to you mom, who brought tons
of sun to many rainy Oregon weekends.
I can see you standing at
the stove when I got home from school concentrating on cooking dinner, apron
carefully tied in back until I snuck into the kitchen and furtively untied the
strings, laughing as I scooted fast, making my getaway into the adjoining breakfast
nook. You feigned annoyance but couldn’t hide your smile as you went back to
stirring the gravy or sautéing onions and garlic.
Mom, you knew how to play
and you glimmered in fun when my friends came over after school or on weekends
to partner in crime with me in stealing snickerdoodle cookies from the highest
cupboard shelf where you’d made a half-hearted attempt to hide them from your
marauding son and his chums who always loved visiting with Mrs Lautz. A fact
which made me happy and proud.
Your generosity of spirit
and goodness shines through now as I write these words to thank you for how you
‘mom’d’ us so well, which given some facts of our family’s life, was often not
an easy task.
Even the time at the top
of the basement stairs when in a moment of over-the-top annoyance with my and
Chris’s shenanigans, you cracked our heads together--shocking the crap out of
both of us because you almost never lost your cool—turned out eventually to be
somehow or other fun, aching forehead notwithstanding!
All the times only you
could locate our lost baseball under the holly tree or in scary
Mrs Tupling’s hallowed
rose bushes next door should qualify you for sainthood mom.
It’s been 27 years I
haven’t been able to bring you flowers and See’s Candy and a card on this day
and I wish to hell that wasn’t so Mom. I love you and shall always deeply
appreciate
how you loved me and
nourished me (via food and much more) and made our home,
well, a home… and if
there’s an afterlife, I’m sure you are enlivening it with love and laughter and
filling it with your very special sweetness.
Amen.
