A visit with mom
Yesterday, I drove windy backroads lush with pine forests in and out of Louisiana and Mississippi that lead to Franklinton, where my mom is buried and where her people are from. My mom’s people – salt of the earth – are farmers, paper mill workers, teachers, geologists, photographers, artists, nurses and 4H competitors.
The day we buried my mom, I walked up to my uncles and aunt who were standing abreast and thought they are the next line of elders. I think I awkwardly voiced this thought to them. I wasn’t necessarily thinking of them dying so much as once their line aged, my line would be next.
The back of my car held three different bouquets of silk and plastic flowers that I accumulated from having not gone to my mom’s grave for nearly a year. I also had metal flowers and a metal red cardinal I had bought in Texas on last year’s road trip. Last year was a wing ding doozy, so I had not found the time to make this traditional three-hour round trip.
My mom died a week before I met my son, so I have not visited her grave without him by my side. We would go for Mother’s Day and her birthday, December 28th. This is another reason why I have been away so long, because last year my son was on fire and it was difficult to put it out long enough to drag him along. I was supposed to be in Arizona visiting him at his school, but the snowstorm cancelled that trip, and now here I was going to my mom’s grave without him for the first time.
I have fond memories of visiting my MawMaw when I was a child. My parents would drop off my sister and me, and we would spend nearly the entire summer there on my MawMaw’s dairy farm.
My mom’s younger sister is ten years older than me, so I feel as if my aunt and I grew up together. She and my uncle and I sat around the kitchen table yesterday as their great great grandson dashed in and out of the house. My uncle said they were married at 17 years of age and ten months later had their first child. I asked what it was like to always have children under your feet. My uncle said he’d had to pray because it had not been easy, and he had not always known what to do. That’s about as vulnerable AF an answer as you might expect from a man in his late seventies.
Children, grandchildren, great grandchildren are each their own energy force bringing unsolvable and novel challenges – most of which you don’t want! You don’t learn from raising one how to handle the other. It’s a dynamo of edge-of-the-seat action and response.
Just then, Chai ran up to the outside window dangling a dead mouse by its tail.
Lord Today!
My aunt, though close in age, has taken on the role of matriarch in my mom’s family. My MawMaw is gone. My mom is gone. My aunt fills those shoes naturally.
I left to go over to my mom’s grave, which sits near Thigpen Road (her maiden name is Thigpen), in front of her deceased brother’s house. His wife and her great grandson take care of the small graveyard that holds two large camellia bushes on either end with a chain link fence that squares off the gravesites along with my mother’s, my uncle’s, my cousin’s, and my MawMaw’s graves — with room for mine one day.
MawMaw’s house was a stone’s throw from my uncle’s and the graveyard.
I next drove over to my uncle’s house where as I was looking for the driveway to turn in, I saw a sign that said ASSHOLE painted on a metal rail staked into the ground by the next door property where other cousins live.
I visited with my uncle and his wife and grown son. My cousin is a photographer who captures bugs, slugs, and mushrooms in intricate detail. We all (the elders) traded ailments and remedies for nearly an hour before I left.
I learned my uncle had painted the sign because one of my cousins had unmercifully cut back a row of old growth azaleas that lined Old Choctaw Road. Unfortunately the metal rail doesn’t stay put so it is hard to tell if the sign is pointing to the neighbors as the asshole or my uncle, my aunt told me.
It warmed my heart to know that even as you are entering the real old age years, there is still enough passion to warrant a sign painting. The last few days of dealing with my own known assholes endeared me to my uncle’s cause.
I drove home listening to a nostalgic song I play every time I head there and back – John Denver’s Back Home Again. The song hits me every time. The farm produced profound memories for me as did my MawMaw – one of the kindest humans I have met, and memories of my mom and her vulnerable beauty, well, it’s all a cry fest every time I go.
Hey, it’s good to be back home again
Sometimes this old farm feels like a long lost friend
Yes, and hey, it’s good to be back home again
I drove home a different way than I had come, so the road seemed new and the way back felt hopeful. Before I left, I had hugged everyone tighter than I normally do because I ache for them and for me, for our shared history and lost love ones, for all we lost, are losing, as much as for all we have gained in walking the earth at the same time.
I feel vulnerable to our connection to each other.
