Remembering

My mother loves to get out during the week, so I try to make use of time if I am not teaching in the morning to go and pick her up and take her on an adventure.

I pull up underneath the roof outside her building’s front doorway and wait for her to come out. Planning for an outing means calling with a suggestion and, if she agrees, making sure she puts it on her calendar. I’ve found, the hard way, that her saying that she has written it down does not mean she has written it down. Then I call the morning-of to reaffirm plans and pick-up time. Sometimes she is puzzled when I ask if she is ready to go. If we are still on and I get into the truck, another call is necessary to remind her that I am coming and to head downstairs. No answer means she has forgotten and is waiting in the cold doorway.

In a few minutes she comes outside. She looks around as if winter had made a surprise arrival. I ask if she would be warm enough in the lightweight sweatshirt jacket and sneakers she was wearing given deep snow and 10 degrees above zero. She had planned it this way, she assured me as she pulled herself up into the truck.

We adapt to even the most unsettling of circumstances. I no longer try to arrange things that, at an earlier time, would have been of interest. Now she is happy if we stop in at the post office, buy chicken feed, look at boots at the feed store, or wander the isles of the local CVS. She will pick up stuffed animals, show them to me and laugh. Hard. I remember this with my children and I look at her for a long time, searching for something no longer there.

Lunch is her favorite part of our trip so I make sure to leave time for that. We like a local diner that has good tuna-fish on wheat toast. I quickly scan the menu, decide, set mine down so that I can help with her decision. She’ll tell me that a BLT sounds good today: we agree and I shut her menu. In a moment she looks at me and asks what she is having and picks up the menu again. Sometimes we go back to the BLT but sometimes we start anew. I feel fatigue in the back of my eyes.

We chew our sandwiches, look out the window and make small talk about the cold, the snow. She looks up, agitated and tells me that she doesn’t feel ready, that she is unprepared. Knowing, I still ask, “prepared for what?” “Christmas, of course:” an edge creeps into her voice.

It is February.

We talk and the path feels straight, until it doesn’t. She struggles for words and then I watch her eyes shift as the thoughts have melted into another day, another time, another subject. I try to steer back to where we began but we are too far off the road.

My mother notices her wedding rings and tugs at them. She asks me if she should take them off. I quietly ask her “why?” She says that my father has a girlfriend and doesn’t want anything to do with her anymore so she doesn’t need the rings. I remind her that my father died four years ago and she slaps her hand, rings down, on the table and says sharply, “No, he did not. I saw him the other day with her in the parking lot.”

We walk into the cold and climb back into the truck, grateful for heated seats. My mother opens her purse to look for her keys. Again. I watch her closely and I feel as if my world is slowly pulling apart, like something held with glue for years suddenly beginning to open, revealing rot.

I drive back through the loop at her apartment, grab her bags from the back and help her down from the truck. She smiles and tells me how much fun we had, didn’t we?

On our dirt road thoughts jog as I drive along. I can understand intellectually what is happening, but the child within feels shaken by my mother’s versions of truth, so very different from what I have known, what I have counted on. It is as if I have to rethink my childhood. I feel unsure and unbalanced, like walking on ice.

The week has been bitterly cold. Dried Hydrangeas have blown here from way down in the pasture and skitter across the driveway like tumbleweeds. The snowplow pushes the banks into jagged white mountains on the side of the road, reminding me of being a child, shoveling holes into those mountains and creating tunnels to pop up out of with my friends.

My hands feel tight and numb while we are doing chores, and dragging metal buckets of water makes them ache. I stand and watch the plume from Paul’s snow-blowing lash back into his face. Bronte leans against the wind, her black and white fur pinned back, her ears pointed and snow covering her snout. She is an Arctic wolf.

I start down the hill to check on the bee hives. The road to the pastures has not been plowed or shoveled. My boots break through the snow and are the first marks made. Snow sneaks around pants and fills my boots as I haul first one leg and then the other up and over. Bronte tucks close behind me to take advantage of me breaking trail. I can hear my breath rise from my chest, I stop and stand still. I know this place but feel I’m creating a new path. Around and beside me landscape looks familiar although, like Sam and Muir, everything is buried under white.

Bending my neck back, I lift my face up and become aware of new warmth in the sun’s light. The silence is broken by a bird calling, the first I have heard since winter began. I stand there and cry tears that freeze on my cheeks. Jagged, icy sounds rise from my lungs.

I am crying for what is buried beside me: I am crying for what I have lost and am losing. But I realize that I am also crying with joy for the familiar that is suddenly returning. This day in late winter holds a promise: even when the past is buried so deep that I cannot bring it back up, even when I’m standing in snow up to my waist and feel unable to step forward, the world will keep moving and change will come.