Chasing Away Sorrow

 

This entire month of blog challenge, dealing with family, led me to yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Obvious, I know. I knew that at some point I was going to have to speak seriously about my mother, and I knew how difficult that would be for me.

The stories I’ve written this month have taken me to places where emotions have near drop-kicked me on many days. This one will lay me out completely and I know it. I was going to write it yesterday. I just couldn’t force myself to do it. I wasn’t ready yet to drown in all of those feelings that had been swirling for a month, just under the surface where they would swallow me at the slightest provocation.

Let sleeping dogs lie is the old adage that covers this situation, and I’m about to begin poking that big brute that lives below the waves. That being the case, I’ll share a part of my mother that has less sorrow for me.

Mom loved kids and animals better than anything else in the world, family excluded, of course. She was a natural mother, who could sooth any child, tame just about any creature, and generally get along with the world regardless of circumstance.

From the time I was about thirteen or so, old bird cages, boxes, baskets, etc. shared Mom’s kitchen with us. Inside those cages, boxes, baskets, etc. were babies. Some were birds, some baby bunnies, or any number of other wild things. She definitely took after her mother in that regard.

There were orphans that stick strongly in my memory. I came home one day to find baby groundhogs nestled inside an old towel in a cardboard box on a chair beside the stove. They were two of the sweetest little creatures I’d ever seen; all brown and cuddly, rolled up into balls keeping warm against each other. Someone had found them abandoned and had brought them to Mom.

I don’t remember how long she had them before the groundhogs were released, and I don’t know that it matters now. I do know that there were few weeks during spring or summer when orphans didn’t come to our house.

Dad brought her the baby bunnies. He was mowing the yard and didn’t realize that one of the local cottontails had made her warren near the edge of the driveway. The rabbits were tiny things and terrified. Dad knew that the mother would never return to the nest warren after it had been disturbed.

On another occasion, a friend brought her a pair of silver fox babies to tend for a few weeks, until they were weaned. He bred silver foxes and needed a surrogate mother for them for a while. Mom did her thing and they soon went back to their rightful home.

One wet, cold spring day, Mom went mushroom hunting. Keeping her out of the woods during mushroom season was unheard of. Having her come home with a baby Great Horned Owl, though, was different. The wee thing had fallen/or been pushed from its next.

She heard it, found it, and scooped it up. It was in shock; its down feathers were soaked, and it couldn’t stop shivering from the cold. It was so young that its talons hadn’t completely hardened. She perched it on her shoulder, under her hood where it could get dry and warm. Mushroom bag in one hand, and one holding the owl in place, she returned to the house.

Peeper, named for the sound he made, sat on the rim of a half-peck basket in the kitchen when I came in. I’d never seen an owl baby before, especially up close. I fell in love with those big, sincere eyes. Mom just laughed. She had one convert.

Mom ended up with all of us vying for owl-holding privileges. He ate fresh ground beef, fresh fish, and chicken. Meat wasn’t difficult to get for him.

During his growth period, we all rallied to teach him how to be an owl, but Mom was the one he looked to. She was his mother. Dad could teach him to hoot. All of us could help teach him to fly. We could all help to teach him to hunt on the fly and catch his prey.

But Mom was the one to whom he returned the next spring to show off his new mate. She was the one’s whose approval he needed before leaving for his adult life.

When I think about all of her orphans, Peeper and Jim, the crow, stand out as the most like family members. Jim was the orphan who remained with her to the end, the one she grieved for when his curiosity and trust turned fatal.

Jim gave her more delight than all of her other orphans. He lived in the house with us. He went on our outings. He talked to us, but he held conversations with her. And his laughter rang through the air from the roof of the house. Jim was a character that enlivened our lives and made us smile.

I try to keep these memories to the forefront of my mental file cabinet. They help push back the later ones that center on her excruciating pain and life cut short. These orphan memories carry their own tears, but they don’t taint the rest of the day with sorrow.

And these, above all, portray Mom as she was to us more than any others; loving, generous, willing to take in any orphan as a new family member.

Cousins—Who Are They?

 

Most people have cousins, kissing or otherwise. But, who are these people who aren’t part of your nuclear family but who are part of your history, some quite close to you.

Like many, I have tons of cousins, some I’ve never seen, talked to, and whose names I don’t know. Some I’ve not seen for most of my life. Others drop into and out of my life like jumping beans when the occasion warrants. While some never leave my continual memory, others linger only in an occasional, conversationally- triggered recollection, usually in conjunction with something or someone else.

I have one female cousin, for instance who’s a few years older than I. After I left high school, I didn’t see her often. From the early 70’s on, I didn’t see her at all. Of course, part of that was the fact that I didn’t live there any longer.

She came to my mother’s funeral in 1985 and we got a chance to talk for a while. Months later I didn’t get an opportunity to join her at her mother’s funeral. I was, again, out of state and unable to attend. I’ve always felt bad about that.

Our lives had taken such divergent paths, she with marriage and career, and me with exploration, that connecting didn’t enter the mix of our lives. That’s when an oddity landed in my inbox. A Facebook message came along that changed all that distance into an opportunity to reacquaint myself with this woman who’d sat in Grandma’s house and played with paper dolls.

She’s had three successful careers in her lifetime; corporate, consultant, and her own business of interior design. She’d grown restless and bored after retiring from corporate and plunged into design. She’d been business woman of the year a few times. She was still married. A dynamo, all the way around.

She reached out to me because we hadn’t seen or talked to each other since 1985 and she wanted to reconnect. I’m glad that she did.

We’re different people now, all grown up, histories of our own, failures and successes unique to ourselves, and generally have something interesting to share with each other. Those facts allow us to come together as two ends of a severed rope; each end having frayed in a slightly different pattern and tangle, but still able to be spliced back together and made stronger for it.

I’ll be honest here. I don’t reconnect with old friends and relations very well. I don’t have the knack of it yet. I never did, really.

I’m always anxious about who the person has become and whether I can now trust them as much as I did the last time we met. The converse is also true. There’s always the possibility that they’re most trustworthy than the last time we met. That very potential creates anxiety until they reveal who they are at present.

With cousins, the anxiety is double. These are part of the family. They are supposed to be trustworthy by definition and subject to championing me and mine at all times. It’s the possibility for disappointment or disillusionment that keeps meetings shaky. At least for me.

This new reconnection, though, is going along very well, I have to say. My cousin and I have plenty to explore within each other’s lives, talents, and changes. The person I knew from high school was a dim shadow of the woman I’ve come to know recently.

Today’s cousin has a fuller, richer personality, a deeper spirit than the one from memory. This cousin will become a very good friend for this time in my life.

 

Navigating The South-Personal History Counts

The cultural differences between far North frontier country and Southern deep roots would throw anybody into shock.

The precipitator of this condition of shock may lie in the fact that many in the North tend to categorize the South. Some dismiss those of the South as the eccentric cousins who aren’t discussed in polite society all that often. After all, they say, Southerners are the ones who brought about that wicked Civil War and all, don’t you know.

Believe it or not, there are those that still think that way. Aside from that, according to others, Southerners are known to be just a hair short on the mental acuity scale. Otherwise they would be out in the world far more and be recognized for their entrepreneurial acumen and social hipness.

Sarcastic? Me? Never!

Reality Check

I can tell you two things for certain sure. I grew up with half my family from the South where I spent as much time as possible, and I lived in the western part of the South for more years than I care to count.

‘Course, living there cured me of one thing–smoking. Couldn’t do it anymore. Didn’t need to be doing it in the first place. Found a way to get rid of the habit for good, and I’ve never been more glad about anything in my life.

Childhood Memories

Because of  my age I remember how the older South used to function. I remember the time before the Civil Rights Movement. I remember watching an older black gentleman step off the sidewalk so that my mother, grandmother, and I could walk past him as he tipped his hat to us. I also remember crying because I thought I’d done something wrong that made him not want to be on the same street as me.

My mother, of course, explained the situation to me right there on the sidewalk. I got indignant (I was very good then at doing indignant) and demanded my grandmother explain why her people would ever do such a thing. All of which upset her no end, as you can imagine. I was very young at the time, challenging an elder about social etiquette. And I did apologize later.

Things settled down a bit during the rest of the visit, but I’ve always been able to close my eyes and see that episode behind the lids anytime I wanted. It was a great social leveler for me.

Farm Living

What else do I remember? I remember catching Grandaddy and my little brother one afternoon, down feeding the hogs (my grandparents were farmers–what were known as sharecroppers, actually.) Indignation swarmed up my backside that afternoon, too.

They were sitting in the back of the big cargo wagon that was heaped with little bitty watermelons about the size of half a soccer ball. Grandaddy would cut a melon in half, hand one half to my brother while keeping one for himself. Each of them would scoop out the heart of the melon, eat it, and then throw the rest to the hogs across the fence before moving on to the next melon.

Now, I knew how those little melons tasted. They were like watermelon flavored honey in a bowl, and I wanted my fair share. Well, wouldn’t you know that the good-old-boys party was just wrapping up when I arrived. I only got the one little melon. –Not that I could have stuffed more than one down my gullet anyway.–

Ever Ride A Cow?

There was a neighbor boy named Hunter who lived down the lane. He used a big Black Angus bull for a horse and rode that animal everywhere. My brother wanted to be just like Hunter, running through the woods barefoot, shooting his .22 and generally running wild.

To that end little bro decided one day, while we were helping my aunt milk the cows, that he wanted to ride one of them. Now, my aunt was raised on a farm and knew how a farm and its animals operated. And she had a really good suspicion what would happen if bro rode milk cow.

She couldn’t talk him out of it, though, so when all the milk was secured and the cows were ready to go back out into the pasture, she asked him which cow he fancied. Being the adventurer that he was, he chose the big Guernsey. Well, my aunt got the cow out into the barn’s center, made sure of  the halter rope, and told him to hop right up there on the cow.

I have to admit, he did pretty good. He managed to last almost the entire 8 seconds before hitting the ground with a whoosh. He was a bit stunned. After all, Hunter made it look so easy. But then, Hunter wasn’t trying to ride a milk cow that had never held a rider before. Hurt? Nah, bro wasn’t hurt, except for his pride.

I confess. I laughed my tail off. My good aunt didn’t, bless her heart. That was the last I ever saw of that cow, though.

High Times

I remember an ice storm at Thanksgiving one year, which forced us to drive home in it on less-than-new tires and seeing my dad white-knuckled at the wheel, knowing he was silently praying that we made it home one state away before we got killed. I do believe Mom was praying just as hard as Dad.

Personally, I was enjoying the fairy castle quality the ice gave all the trees and undergrowth. I’d never seen the effects of an ice storms before. All these years later, I’ve seen too many years of destruction from Nature’s Ice Queen.

There were so many times back then when fun was had by simply playing Red Rover in my grandparents front yard. Or standing in the stripping shed during our autumn visits, stripping tobacco to put in the drying barns. That time was filled with country music blaring from the radio, listening to my grandmother and aunts relate family history and community news in soft twang that amuses so many not of the South, and just spending time together.

The one thing that the south will never be short of is family solidarity. A family member might bring the wrath of the family down on his/her head by shaming the family name, but before that any member will fight to the death for any other member of that family.

The South is hot, sticky, contrary sometimes, and solidly itself. It doesn’t claim to be anything else and never will. If you want proof of that, go down to South America and into Brazil’s interior and visit the city that our South built from the ashes of the Civil War. They still Fly the Confederate flag as their own. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,965976,00.html

Betcha didn’t know that, huh?

‘Til next time, have a great day, y’all. Catch the last of those lightning bugs and enjoy the homemade ice cream. I’ll have the peach, please.

A bientot,

Claudsy