MOTHER’S DAY 2009

For quite a few years now, on Mother’s Day I have gotten my summer family; it has been the day the ‘kids’ arrive for the theatre summer. This year, because of the wonky calendar, they are not coming until this week. Which is just as well because of course there is still a ton of stuff to do before they get here, and that’s been compounded by a tree falling on one of the cast houses Saturday night during a thunderstorm. Our spring has been – well, let me just say that the F***Up Fairy can just go squat over someone else for a while and we won’t mind a bit.
So, my Mother’s Day was a lot of running back and forth to try to line up someone to fix the roof, cover the hole in it and the broken window, get stuff to cover the window myself and then take it back because one of the contractors contacted did show up (the man has my business, he showed up not only on Sunday but on Mother’s Day), as did someone from the tree service to discuss getting a 3-thick, 40 +- foot tall tree away from the house and out of the yard.
The nice early breakfast at the firehouse ended up being a hurried one at 11 a.m., the other plans went down the tubes, but I did get a couple of planned projects done, so it wasn’t a total waste. Then I went to the Dairy Queen for supper and a large Midnight Truffle Blizzard – I fully recommend them as an antidote to a bad day, btw – even though half of it is still in the freezer because I was stuffed!
Speaking of being stuffed, it was my weekend: Friday Jesse and I went over to Kinderhook to Pi Café, a highly recommended place, and ate ourselves into oblivion; Saturday night I went to my sisters for a birthday/Mother’s Day cookout with the nieces and their families – we laughed a lot and everyone took turns holding Mary’s new puppy, my mother would have approved; anyway came home from that with too much pork loin, grilled jerk chicken, grilled sausage and peppers, and the traditional angel food cake with strawberries and ice cream under my belt.
Never did see my daughter yesterday, but we talked on the phone quite a while – actually twice, because she called me by mistake at 1 a.m., about the whole tree falling on the house (since no one could remember that I was at my sister’s, she stood in with me on the scene with Lynne and Monica), and again in the afternoon, in between my running around and projects.
I just finished reading a very sweet tribute to his mother by a blogger I follow (A Day In The Life Of An Ambulance Driver). Apparently they were somewhat estranged, and this tribute chronicled his reversal of that as she spent her last days in an ICU. Well told.
Our last days with our mother were in the hospital, although not ICU. I took her there four days before, when the doctor told her she needed to get further checked out and that she should not drive herself, as she had to his office. We had known she was getting less able to be by herself, and even she had been talking about not being sure she could spend another winter alone in the house that was home for 50 years.
My sister and I, and my cousin who had spent part of his growing up with us were with her. The grandchildren had all been there, and we talked and laughed a lot. My niece Penny and I had to go out into the hall to laugh when the woman in the other bed asked ‘Are you all part of a religious group, come to pray over her?’ She’d have laughed at that too. Not that she wasn’t religious, in her own way. She did her share of saintly things, with the farm work, raising the family (my sister and I and several other ‘strays’ who came and went) and an assortment of outside, community things. She was honored by Eleanor Roosevelt, during an on the site radio broadcast, quite a deal for the early 1950’s, for her work in making an historic school house over into a community hall.
She is honored just about every day in my memory, and I repeat what I said at her funeral: ‘Some people say ‘Oh, no, I’m becoming my mother’ – I say ‘I should be so lucky’.”
Thanks, Mommy.