Happy Mother's Day

When I was a child, I liked nothing better than to creep into the dark recesses of my parents’ closet, pull out the picture album, and pore over pictures of my mother when she was young. She was foreign, nearly exotic, in those already aging photographs with her permed 30’s style hair and wide, bright eyes.

I crouched over the dusty album, trying in vain to connect the beautiful young girl in the photographs to a mother who at that very moment was laboring over a hot stove, preparing a meal for her farmer husband and crowd of unruly children.

My favorite photograph, the one that held me captive with silent wonder, was of my mother in dark sweater and plaid skirt perched on a woodpile in an unknown and unfamiliar woods. How old was she? 17? 18? 20? What color was her sweater? Her skirt? What made her eyes flash so?

I had only known her as a cleaning woman, wash woman, cook, 24-hour guardian determined to make wayward children behave. I had seen her shucking corn from the garden, plucking feathers from freshly slaughtered chickens, painting the walls of the house, fashioning slipcovers or clothing on a treadle sewing machine when the children were abed and the only sound was the click of the machine and the call of frogs through the open window.

I had heard the creak of the floorboards as she went from bedroom to bedroom, tucking covers about children in fitful sleep; watched her figure and refigure the grocery list in a vain effort to stretch the money to buy all that was needed. I have felt her kiss me goodbye and hello and all the other times in between for no particular reason.

But I have never seen her perched on a woodpile in a forest in an unlikely sweater and skirt, flashing smile lighting carefree expression.

Other pictures in the album were just as impossible; my mother in in her 20s wearing winter coat and French beret; as a child spindly legged and thin, leaning into her mother’s aproned side; posing on the running board of a huge, ancient roadster beside the much loved sister who died young of appendicitis.

She was a stranger in that album, one that I longed to meet. She has been a stranger at other times in my life: when she sat staring into the crackling fire after learning that the mother she had leaned against in that long forgotten picture had terminal cancer; as she conversed in animated sign language with a deaf uncle; when she sat silent, undecipherable, listening to taped songs written and performed by her musician sons, both claimed by the same force that took her mother; and in more recent years sitting on the iron bench beside my father's grave in the family cemetery, staring into the distance.

Today, my mother’s black hair has turned to white, her face marked with more than nine decades of living. She is no longer the young girl in the picture album and I am glad. I no more prefer that beautiful stranger than I prefer an empty canvas to a rich and colorful masterpiece; or smooth bland marble to a carefully hewn sculpture. I yearned toward the young girl when I was a child and knew no better. I yearn now toward the woman, the mother, the grandmother, the great grandmother and great-great grandmother she has become.