Remembering Mama in May--the Month of her Birth, the Month of her Death

Greetings friends, followers, and passers-by. That's the kind of hello my mother liked. She was big on recitation and a noticer of time passing. For breakfast I would hear, instead of grace, "Here hath been dawning another blue day. Think! Wilt thou let it slip useless away?" At noon would come, "Full many a flower was born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air."At twilight, it would be, "Time you old gypsy man, will you not stay, put up your caravan just for one day?" In between would be sprinkled snippets of songs aimed directly my way: "Time's running out on you, what will you doooooo?" I got the point early. To live on this part of her earth, one had to be busy. She didn't believe in chores. "Your childhood is golden. There's plenty of time when you are grown to learn how to do dishes." I knew what that meant. A project. A project, of course, should never be a chore. It had to be the freeing of the spirit to do fine things. She did plenty of them (like my favorite, the papier-mache flamingo for a baby shower which she chose over a stork b/c it was her belief storks only lived in Holland). While she and my brother were High Energy, I was the Woolgatherer, a fancy word for chronic daydreamer. I discovered at a very young age that the way to get out of projects was to practice the piano. My mother knew nothing about piano playing so if I practiced scales for hours, she beamed. She didn't know that scales were so boring, I could drift off in minutes to some of my favorite not-hot places like Helsinki or Edinburgh. My brother, on the other hand, was stuck. Because we were a traveling family, every two years some place new, we had trunks. The year my dad was assigned to Washington, D.C., we had something else very useful. Shirt cardboards. In those days when shirts were taken to the cleaner's, they were folded with a rectangle of thin cardboard which my mother rounded up from neighbors. I feared the worst and practiced furiously. To keep my brother from Idle Hands Syndrome, she devised an art project. She was enthralled with Egypt. My brother was a superior artist. She combined the two by having him draw hieroglyphics on the shirt cardboards, cutting them out, and pasting them on a trunk. She then swaddled it in burnt umber and topped it with some kind of finishing touch that smelled like a day in the park with bees. I was fascinated by their work and immediately fell in love with the trunk. It was a spectacular success and my mother knew a good thing when she saw it. Altogether, they did four large trunks and seven footlockers, only one of which she did alone. Perhaps it is because my brother in later years became a minimalist or perhaps because the project was not as fascinating to him, he didn't want them. It landed to Moi to be the Keeper of the Trunks. However, widowhood necessitated letting go in many ways and so I decided I needed to let go of the trunks. The first one I gave to a Wiccan who exclaimed when she saw it, "The hieroglyphics are all happy! There's the giraffe with the palm tree! Do you know what that means???" No, I didn't. I didn't even think there were giraffes in Egypt. I thought camels ruled. "It's good fortune! The giraffe is far-seeing and the tree signifies abundance." Well, I'll be! Obviously she had to have that trunk. When I said, "Take it. It's yours," she almost cried and said the karma would come down in abundant love some day. That worked for me! My daughter was the recipient of the next trunk and in Roanoke, Susan received the one my mother had done alone, a decoupaged trunk in which Susan displayed her skeins. Cheryl received one of the large trunks. I knew it would have a good home at her magnificent mountainside house with the labyrinth in the garden. What I didn't realize was it wasn't the end of the story http://healingwoman.blogspot.com for that particular gift. The photo above is from Cheryl's blog As you can see, she transformed the decades old Lady of the Travels into a museum piece by adding gold leaf to make the figures "pop." My mother would have been amazed and couldn't have imagined where her project, accompanied by the A minor scale on an afternoon of my childhood, would find its resting place: viewed by people all around the world. Sure enough, it was "Time well spent" and "All's well that ends well."

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....may old sayings and exuberant projects be part of your life to brighten all its days....