Pine Cones and Memories of Mother
I ran across a couple things that stuck me this week during what would have been Mother’s 98th Birthday Season. We’ll get to them in a second.
Back in 2014, Mother and I went trekking for pine cones that we could use as fire starters. She took to it like a kid on Easter morning.
Today, I took Road Warriorette Shari and her mother, Senior Honorary Road Warriorette LaFern, to an undisclosed location for a similar hunt. (“If anybody asks what we’re doing, tell them we’ve been sentenced to community service,” I told them.)
When we were through, I said we’d make a side trip over to New Lorimier Cemetery to wish Mother a Happy Birthday with a pair of our pine cones. I mean, flowers are so ordinary.
Gregory Lincoln’s Thoughts
Gregory A. Lincoln administrator of Facebook’s Cape Rewound, a popular group with 5,311 members (and counting) recently lost his mother. He shared this with the group:
Sitting in my bed enjoying the pretty full moon shine through my bedroom window. 🙂. It’s been a very rough weekend. It’s hard to imagine her gone. All my life she was very tough and fought death and seem to always win except that final battle. I don’t understand. I assume it’s a battle we will all lose sooner or later. I guess she knew in her heart it was her time. Her birthday is approaching so please excuse me if I share a memory, a photograph or heart touching song.
About the same time, I was sorting stuff that had buried my desk, deciding what I wanted to keep, and what would be good fireplace fodder now that the weather is turning chilly.
Memories Sneak Out of My Eyes
In the stack was a letter from Brother Mark. It was a rambling thing, all full of non sequiturs and whimsy. On the last page, in the last paragraph before reaching a photo of Mother in one of her signature red coats, he wrote, “As I find myself at the bottom of the page, I couldn’t decide which to end with, so you get both. Put it in context, if you will.
“My memory loves you; it asks about you all the time.”
and
“Sometimes memories sneak out of my eyes and roll down my cheeks.”
Funny: I was looking out my window at the bird feeders today, and thinking I have to clean these windows again so I can see them better. It will be a enormous trick: I have a hurricane shutter track I can’t get off that prevents me from opening the window more than 1 inch. I’ll have to clean off the sill (no mean feat) of my tchotckes and sweet potato vines growing in water, then take off the screen and climb over the sink to clean them. So: they’ll stay dirty.
That made me remember your mom’s kitchen window that I SO wanted to clean for her, but it was a tough one to reach without a precarious ladder arrangement on a slope using a long-handled brush or something. Fail.
Then I came to Facebook, and found an article on retired nurses using Plarn – the plastic bag “yarn” your mother used for seat mats.
That led me to her yard again, where I recalled the cool wind spinner Mark got her. My sister gave me a matching one for Christmas a couple years back.
In short, my memory loves her, too – and she lives on and on.
As I say all the time, we are alive so long as someone remembers us.
I may wash that kitchen window in your honor.