Happy Mother's Day...

Happy Mother's Day, to all who celebrate. 

In second grade, when I was 8 years old, just before Mother's day, I lost my grandmother.  She was my dad's mom, and had raised a fairly large family.  I was blessed to live within a mile of her, and some days my father would take me over to her house so I could spend the day out of my mother's way, as she worked to take care of my increasing number of younger sisters.  

And with four of them, you can imagine the amount of time I spent over there.  Some of my clearest memories of her include the toy basket, literally a green woven basket, about 18 inches tall, filled with toys which these days would be on a shelf, labeled antiques.  For me, they were merely 50 year old things like little cars and trucks and other things my father probably played with.  There were also the wooden block toys which I could play with, but didn't interlock and stay together like my Lego Blocks did.

And then there was that glorious huge yard.  Her house was on the banks of the Mississippi River, on the north side of the lot.  On the east side, facing the river, was a small lowered area Grandma called her "Rock Garden".  It was an area that had a grove of pine trees on the north side, and the lower areas under them had been somehow sort of hollowed out so there was a small, dark cave-type space under the trees.  Much of the rest of the lower area was about a foot to three feet below the rest of the yard, surrounded by a hand-picked rock wall where flowers peeped out between them, including a purple, small flower Grandma called the "Johnny Jump Ups" which she said were named after me, which I suspect was the same thing she told my father.  There were also some granite slabs for steps down there, and a big tree with a bent trunk in the middle of this lowered area, along with my favorite spot, a grassy slope I could roll down and run back up to do it again.

In later years, when we lived there, I learned that this was the place where they had managed to build a diving board, right above the bay which was also fed by a spring and was at least some 20 feet deep.  To the south of it was another area that had been, I realized when I started cleaning it up, stabilized by more rocks, because there was another set of granite slab stones laid into the ground to get all the way down to the river.  As it often happens in houses like hers, those stairs were there, known by many of my relatives, but they weren't often cleared when the twenty or so oak trees would drop their leaves each fall.  When we moved there and I discovered what they were, I made it my mission to clear down to the stone, all the way down to the river, to reach that spot.  It became my second-favorite spot in the yard, after my favorite, just a little further south on the river.

In the late 1940s or early 1950s, the paper mill, some two miles south of where that house was, added a more permanent dam on the Mississippi.  It wasn't the first dam on the river, it was, however, one that could stop or control the water flow, and did the unexpected to my grandmother's home, where the current flow changed around the point just to the north of that house, which allowed a sand bar that extended from that point and the beach in front of the neighbor-to-the-north's home to protect the flow from the very small creek next to their house, and that sand bar eventually grew to completely cut off the little bay.  And when that happened, the leaves which fell into the water there, and then failed to flow out and down river with the current, became a mucky sort of layer some two feet below the surface of the water.  That "layer" did not function as a bottom, but more as a layer to cut off air and oxygen from the water below.  It was still deep, but it wasn't accessible.  So we stayed out.  And it grew algae and mosquitoes.  

But my memories of my grandmother were always tied to that place.  That was the only place I saw her.  My father was her only child who was local, we had an aunt and uncle some 30 miles away to the north, most of my other aunts had move with their husbands further south, to the Twin Cities area.  The yard had some other truly wonderful features and areas to play.  But there were days, like the one where I was playing with the back door, where I succeeded in locking grandma and I out of her house (via the screen door), and we had to wait until my father got off work, came home, and helped us break in.

When she passed, just before Mother's Day in 1972, it was pretty devastating to me and my father.  Grandma had been in the hospital, fallen out of bed, broken her hip, and did not recover.  

Which tends to also remind me of my own mother's death in 2016, where she had gone into the hospital for surgery, and never came out either.  She'd also lost a hip, but a lifetime of smoking had given her body the inability to recover from things like cancer, which had spread throughout her body.  

Which brings me to the rather happy fact that my wife never continued her own misadventures with smoking, quitting less than a year after starting, so we got that going for us.

But Mother's Day.  I'm reminded of the great women who raised me and set me on this path, and honored by my wife, who made me a father, and made me a better person for those two kids who we set on their own paths to greatness.  And there's the eight pets, four cats, four dogs, only one of which is still with us, who have required less overall attention than the children did, but I can tell you when the pets left home, that was far more traumatic than the kids.

But we're there.  One dog, an otherwise empty nest, people-wise, so I guess we've done our first dozen or so phases of parenting, and my wife has been one great mother to those kids.  I'm no longer able to tell when they're joking when they tell her she has to outlive me, because I communicate terribly.  Given the speed and frequency with which they respond, or more often fail to, when I attempt to communicate, well, I guess I earned that.  

But this morning my wife is being taken out for brunch by my son and daughter.  I get to come along, so that's a bonus, but they're buying hers.  And as I asked them earlier this month, my wish for father's day was for them to take good care of their mother on Mother's Day.  Not because I'm incapable, I'm not, we made Eggs Benedict for her many times, with varying degrees of success, over the years, but these days, she's the one I worry about most.  Without her, I shudder to think how my life would have been different, and most likely wasted.  But with her as my best friend, I can accomplish just about anything.  Including helping to turn a couple blobs that ate, pooped, and cried into decent human beings who are buying their mother brunch.  

That's pretty special, I think.  And it's really opened my eyes to the amount of work mothers go through every day.  I'm not ignorant to the fact that they do a lot more than us guys do.  They deserve this day, and a few hundred others, each year, for their work.  But I'd better get moving so we can celebrate the one.