What’s the Coolest Thing Your Mom Ever Did?
She wasn’t like the other moms, that’s for sure.
My mother died the day after the 2016 election. My niece was at her bedside in the hospital and called me. “Memaw can’t let go I think because she needs to hear from you”. She put the phone by my mother’s head and I said all the things one says to a dying mother and meant every word regardless of the complicated ways in which we’d loved each other over the years. She died two hours later. I couldn’t cry. The next day Leonard Cohen died. Then I could cry.
Mother and daughter stuff can be tricky.
Let’s be clear up front: yes, I really loved my mother. And, yes, I didn’t speak to her directly in the final seven years of her life (there’s a book in there).
But my mother did some incredibly cool things in her life.
And I’d have to say that, hands down, the coolest thing my mother did with me when I was a kid was to teach me how to catch garter snakes so they couldn’t bite me and so I didn’t hurt them.
There was a small pond down the hill from our front yard when we still lived in tiny Randolph, New York, and there were a lot of strange and wonderful things living in that pond. Shrill spring peepers were deafening on early spring nights. Mythically huge dragonflies…
