My Mother The Hurricane

My Beautiful Mother

My mother wasn’t the best housekeeper. Actually it was a talent she never acquired. If you visited our house, you had to clear a space to sit down. This didn’t faze Mother though. In her mind you were coming to see her, not her house.

Mother could turn the whole house upside down with a task as simple as watering her plants. She couldn’t just water the plants with a simple watering can. No. Each plant had to be brought to the kitchen sink, the soil checked, the plant doused, fed, and left to rest. While it was extremely important to Mother to water her plants, it wasn’t so extremely important to put them back.

When my sisters and I came home from school we'd find wet African Violets, and potting soil, and feeding spikes everywhere. Stray leaves would be living in every drinking glass we owned. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t one single drinking glass left in the whole house. Nope. Much more important to Mother was that every leaf be saved. So, there they were, all the glasses lined up on the shelf, over the sink, full of leaves just waiting to take root.

Dumbfounded, my sisters and I would just stare at each other. Inevitably one of us would blurt out, “Oh God … Mom’s been watering the plants again!” Then we would set about cleaning the kitchen because let there be no doubt, Mother would have made us dinner amidst the mess and we would have eaten hash with a little potting soil mixed in.

Every now and then Mother actually did clean, which meant pulling every thing off every shelf, out of every drawer, and every cabinet. Each treasure would be inspected and dusted. And then left right where she put it down. Again we’d come home from school, walk through the front door, look at each other, and say, “Oh God, Mom’s cleaning again!!” It got to be that we didn't want to leave her alone for a day.

Mother’s curiosity once led to a blob that lived in a jar on top of our kitchen cabinets for what seemed like years. Everyone who ever visited us over the years still remembers it—and it’s still highly talked about. Mother was so proud of it and pointed it out to every single person who entered our home. There it sat, year after year amid the grease and grime, bubbling and fermenting. She actually thought we would eat it some day.

While I don’t recall exactly what happened to it, I seem to have a faint memory of all of us gathering to see if it was ripe yet, opening the jar, and running from the house screaming.

At the time I was sure our mother deliberately made messes for us to clean up. That's not how I see it today. I realize she just didn’t see messes. To her, the outcome wasn't nearly as important as the adventure. Chaos could be swarming around her and she never noticed. Rather she was intent on living in the moment, on the thing she was doing, or on the person she was talking to.

And that’s what this tale is about really. It may have appeared that Mother walked through life with blinders on. But don’t be fooled, she did not.

“I know I have cancer and you know I have cancer,” she whispered to me one day. “But humor me and let’s not talk about it.” So we didn’t. Mother braved her illness as she did so many others, by taking each day as it came, by laughing, and never taking anything too seriously. She was extraordinary to witness and—personally—powerful to behold. Even then, though, it was still exhausting cleaning up after her. She would leave balls of wool, patterns, scissors, or crochet hooks all over the place. But that's another story for another time.

Someone once told me, “There can be a room full of people and total chaos about, but when I’m with your mother, she makes me feel like I’m the only one in the room.”

So you see, Mother was right. Nobody did see the African Violet leaves, or potting soil, or plant food. No one ever gave a thought to the trinkets she left all over the place. They just delighted in her company.
God help them though had they been with us when we opened the blob jar, for they too would have run from the house screaming.