Memories of Mom



After my birthday came memories of my mother.  She's been gone twenty years this year, done in by emphysema and a lifetime of smoking.  One of my strongest memories of her is that she got up very early, sometimes as early as 4am to have "some time to myself" as she lived with four daughters and Dad in a not so large house.  I can see her sitting quietly at the kitchen table with a cigarette burning in her ashtray and what was probably the third cup of coffee in the morning, sugar and cream.  In a really early memory I was looking up at her as she popped leftover pie dough in the oven to make treats.   You know maybe, the kind where you butter the raw dough and sprinkle cinnamon and sugar on it.  Then you slice it and roll it into tiny bun-like goodies and bake them?  She was in a skirt and sweater and shoes with little heels on them.  Unlike me whose daily costume seems to be jeans and tees, I don't think she wore a pair of jeans ever in her life.

 

 

About a year after our mother died my father hired a small plane and with three daughters scattered her ashes on the seaward side of Haystack rock at Cannon Beach.  Cannon Beach was where he and Mom had spent their brief honeymoon after their wedding in Portland in 1941.

 

Mom and me in Seattle 1942.

 

Her name was Rosemary and she looks like a child herself to me in this picture.  I was their first baby and Mom liked to tell me I was also the first baby she had ever held.  She had no siblings and was often shocked and upset at the quibbling and arguing that went on with her daughters.  "I'd of loved to have had a sister," she'd say, "I was so lonesome."  "Here take mine," we'd say.  Now I miss my sisters and I belatedly realize what she'd been telling us.  Although she still needed her morning time without us.