Remembering Mother
When I was nine years old a man in a rumpled suit and thin, stained necktie knocked on our screen door. I almost made it up to see what he wanted, but my mother shoved me back into the chair I had been sitting in.
I watched as he entered and wiped his brow with the sleeve of his jacket, all the while introducing the housewife’s miracle products he had to offer. His case of miracles opened to display brushes and combs and soaps and oils that were “Guaranteed to garner the respect from others for your exceptional eye for quality.” When he closed the sale and closed his case, I noticed a name emblazed on the side: Fuller Brush.
My mother shooed me off before the man left, claiming the static from the radio would rot my brain if I sat there any longer.
From the rutted road where my friend Tom and I sometimes hurled what he called Dizzy Dean fast ball rocks into opposing wheat fields of straw men from outer space, I saw the man leave the house. He descend our front porch steps, knock-kneed, sweating, and empty handed. In a few seconds he stomped past me without a word.
Before my father, the town’s Sheriff, arrived home, my mother encouraged me through squinted eyes and pursed lips to never mention the sweating man. At dinner, her hair glowed, as did her face, but I didn’t hear my father say anything.
When I was eleven, just after a memorial service for Uncle Mike who died and was buried somewhere in France, an old dust layered Studebaker pulled up to our house. A portly man with an egg-shaped head opened the car’s trunk and pulled out what I recognized as the heralded Electrolux Cleaner and Air Purifier.
Later that day the Studebaker passed me with a blinding dust up, nearly toppling me from my bike. It almost laid waste to the groceries I had been summarily ordered to peddle to town to buy. When I arrived home, I heard mother singing over the roar of her new Electrolux. She saw me enter and turned off the contraption. Leaning down she said, “I’ll be making payments each week, so you may see Mr. Johnson coming back this way. Understand me?”
I was home from school for a few days when I was fourteen after breaking a bone in my elbow. Stupid me, I had tried to out-swing Tom from a tree rope into the Kaw river. While sitting on the front porch, a young man approached our house riding a World War Two surplus motorcycle with sidecar.
“Your mother home?” he asked.
With my good hand I pointed behind me. “Knock.”
After two trips from his sidecar back to the house I heard clanging and conversation from Mother’s small kitchen. Then a giggle. Then a strange quietness. Then she swung the screen door open and leaned out. “Time for you to get some spring in your step, you lazy Lou.” I was at an age where I recognized my cue.
When I was in my junior year and working hard for at least a partial scholarship to Kansas State, my father tossed my mother out. Being a typical teenager I spent little time at home, and wondered if, finally, the cat had caught the mouse. I watched as an odd-shaped suitcase was loaded into Aunt BeeBee’s car, followed by a vacuum cleaner toted by Uncle Jim, who had my cousin James in tow comically balancing a dozen or so pots and pans. Mother, holding a box of new bibles—I must have not been home that morning or afternoon—gave me a hug but didn’t say anything.
A year and some months later as I was preparing to enter college, my father called and asked that I come to town and see him.
“There’s no easy way to say this,” he started as I lowered myself into a chair, “but your mother has lost her mind.”
“Is she…” I didn’t want to finish the question.
“She’s alive. But she’s going to have to go to a mental hospital.”
I wanted to ask, desperately, How could this have happened? It seemed the time to ask, to talk, but he would have none of it and went back to his work.
One day, some months later, a professor anxiously instructed me to go to the office.
Mother was dead.
Now married for nearly a decade, I saw my husband glance at me and smile. He knew how my mind wobbled between past and present and even long lasting episodes of fancy that I chronicled in my bestseller books. I was sure he knew I was going back in time as we sat on the front porch watching the sun set.
Mother needed attention. The brushes and soaps and oils were to pretty herself for a husband whose work had become his love. It was her way of calling him back to her arms. Before that could happen she got caught up with someone who complimented her and gave her hope, a feeling of worth.
At another time, out of earshot but easy to imagine, a man attentively stroked her need for respect through, irrationally, the quality and value of a machine.
Along the way, Bibles likely rekindled beliefs in a higher power, and by faith alone her acceptance of His promised love. Then a younger man hungrily grabbed at her need to be held, knowing that the man she married was not there for her.
Remembering mother offered renewed hope that she did find peace and love in whomever’s hands and whatever spiritual world she ascended to.
She at least deserved that.
Then, having fast forwarded my thoughts to current times, I was roused by an attack from an Angry Bird, my nine year old son’s latest must-have toy. He winked privately, somehow sensing I was dreaming of our recent daytime visitor, Tom.
When I was nine years old a man in a rumpled suit and thin, stained necktie knocked on our screen door. I almost made it up to see what he wanted, but my mother shoved me back into the chair I had been sitting in.
I watched as he entered and wiped his brow with the sleeve of his jacket, all the while introducing the housewife’s miracle products he had to offer. His case of miracles opened to display brushes and combs and soaps and oils that were “Guaranteed to garner the respect from others for your exceptional eye for quality.” When he closed the sale and closed his case, I noticed a name emblazed on the side: Fuller Brush.
My mother shooed me off before the man left, claiming the static from the radio would rot my brain if I sat there any longer.
From the rutted road where my friend Tom and I sometimes hurled what he called Dizzy Dean fast ball rocks into opposing wheat fields of straw men from outer space, I saw the man leave the house. He descend our front porch steps, knock-kneed, sweating, and empty handed. In a few seconds he stomped past me without a word.
Before my father, the town’s Sheriff, arrived home, my mother encouraged me through squinted eyes and pursed lips to never mention the sweating man. At dinner, her hair glowed, as did her face, but I didn’t hear my father say anything.
When I was eleven, just after a memorial service for Uncle Mike who died and was buried somewhere in France, an old dust layered Studebaker pulled up to our house. A portly man with an egg-shaped head opened the car’s trunk and pulled out what I recognized as the heralded Electrolux Cleaner and Air Purifier.
Later that day the Studebaker passed me with a blinding dust up, nearly toppling me from my bike. It almost laid waste to the groceries I had been summarily ordered to peddle to town to buy. When I arrived home, I heard mother singing over the roar of her new Electrolux. She saw me enter and turned off the contraption. Leaning down she said, “I’ll be making payments each week, so you may see Mr. Johnson coming back this way. Understand me?”
I was home from school for a few days when I was fourteen after breaking a bone in my elbow. Stupid me, I had tried to out-swing Tom from a tree rope into the Kaw river. While sitting on the front porch, a young man approached our house riding a World War Two surplus motorcycle with sidecar.
“Your mother home?” he asked.
With my good hand I pointed behind me. “Knock.”
After two trips from his sidecar back to the house I heard clanging and conversation from Mother’s small kitchen. Then a giggle. Then a strange quietness. Then she swung the screen door open and leaned out. “Time for you to get some spring in your step, you lazy Lou.” I was at an age where I recognized my cue.
When I was in my junior year and working hard for at least a partial scholarship to Kansas State, my father tossed my mother out. Being a typical teenager I spent little time at home, and wondered if, finally, the cat had caught the mouse. I watched as an odd-shaped suitcase was loaded into Aunt BeeBee’s car, followed by a vacuum cleaner toted by Uncle Jim, who had my cousin James in tow comically balancing a dozen or so pots and pans. Mother, holding a box of new bibles—I must have not been home that morning or afternoon—gave me a hug but didn’t say anything.
A year and some months later as I was preparing to enter college, my father called and asked that I come to town and see him.
“There’s no easy way to say this,” he started as I lowered myself into a chair, “but your mother has lost her mind.”
“Is she…” I didn’t want to finish the question.
“She’s alive. But she’s going to have to go to a mental hospital.”
I wanted to ask, desperately, How could this have happened? It seemed the time to ask, to talk, but he would have none of it and went back to his work.
One day, some months later, a professor anxiously instructed me to go to the office.
Mother was dead.
Now married for nearly a decade, I saw my husband glance at me and smile. He knew how my mind wobbled between past and present and even long lasting episodes of fancy that I chronicled in my bestseller books. I was sure he knew I was going back in time as we sat on the front porch watching the sun set.
Mother needed attention. The brushes and soaps and oils were to pretty herself for a husband whose work had become his love. It was her way of calling him back to her arms. Before that could happen she got caught up with someone who complimented her and gave her hope, a feeling of worth.
At another time, out of earshot but easy to imagine, a man attentively stroked her need for respect through, irrationally, the quality and value of a machine.
Along the way, Bibles likely rekindled beliefs in a higher power, and by faith alone her acceptance of His promised love. Then a younger man hungrily grabbed at her need to be held, knowing that the man she married was not there for her.
Remembering mother offered renewed hope that she did find peace and love in whomever’s hands and whatever spiritual world she ascended to.
She at least deserved that.
Then, having fast forwarded my thoughts to current times, I was roused by an attack from an Angry Bird, my nine year old son’s latest must-have toy. He winked privately, somehow sensing I was dreaming of our recent daytime visitor, Tom.
