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| Top shelf of my bookcase inherited from my mother. Photo of Mom and my two younger daughters. |
My young mother almost broke into a gallop when she walked. I heard her footfall throughout our small, ranch house, up and down the basement stairs and room to room. Seamlessly, she raced against time to complete one task, then another.
Until her
seventies, seldom did I witness the prized moment when Mom put up her feet. I
cannot remember a book in her hands while she raised my four sisters and me.
Was there such a
thing as book clubs for mothers of Baby Boomers?
Rather, when Mom relaxed,
she held a threaded needle in her right hand, and the hem of a skirt or dress
in her left. She “never stopped until her head hit the pillow,” as she’d say.
Before Webster’s
Dictionary endorsed the term, Sadie O’Brien’s accomplishments included the
first “cottage industry” in the growing city of Warren. Her business began with
sewing for women. Then baking and decorating wedding cakes. When our family
doctor got wind of her culinary reputation, he hired Mom to cater his dinner
parties.
In her fifties she
found time and finances to build her dream home in Kentucky surrounded by flowering
trees and gardens. However, sewing matching Christmas dresses for her five granddaughters
became her favorite creative pastime. And a lure to gather her family around
the expanded table for her famous light rolls hot out of the oven.
Meanwhile, Mom established
a personal library. Her younger brothers built two large bookshelves for the
literature she’d never had time to devour.
In the extending shadow
of this remarkable history, the day arrived when Mom could no longer remember
where she put her book-in-progress. Her footfall no longer bounced from room to
room and up the stairs to the “dormitory” she designed and furnished for her
granddaughters.
At last, under
great distress and opposition, this strong, gifted woman submitted to her
children’s care. After many medical tests, doctors confirmed our mother
suffered from Alzheimer’s and Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “Make the most of the
time you have left,” a doctor advised.
Upon one conversation
with my mother, I asked how she was feeling.
She sighed. “Like
I just hoed a cornfield.”
Perplexed, I
replied, “You hoed cornfields?”
She blinked hard.
“Why, yeah. Everybody who could hold a hoe had to help. I hated it. I’d rather
make supper on the cook stove any day than hoe under the blazing sun. Nothing
makes you bone-tired like hoeing a cornfield.”
At the time, I
could only imagine, for I had yet to begin clearing and plowing land, and
planting lavender fields. Later, I carried my harvest in baskets to the kitchen
table for Mom to help bundle.
“Iris, what do you
call this?”
“Lavender.”
“What do you do
with it?”
“I infused it in
our iced tea. You’re drinking it,” I’d say.
Dear Reader, my
mother could no longer taste to understand lavender, an herb, flavored our tea.
And I soon learned
nothing makes you bone-tired like hoeing a lavender field under a blazing sun.
