She would have celebrated her 100th birthday this September, the birthday month in our family.
Had she dodged the bullet of that one health challenge in June of 2022, she might still be driving to Bojangles when she didn’t like the lunch in Assisted Living; still be walking a mile without a cane or walker; and enjoying the world in which she saw so much beauty.
I learned from her to see.
She was mother and father to me, and indulged my obsession with fishing as a young teenager, sitting for countless hours as I caught and rehomed tiny sunfish from one tepid Alabama pond or another.
She was a super-ager and could banter with anyone, strangers or friends, and would taunt marketing callers who called to report her default in school loans. She baited them in, before remarking in her Scarlett Ohara southern voice: “Oh my, I had no idea I had run up such debt. I graduated in 1939!”
For disputed bills and such, she was quick to go to the top, toe to toe with supervisors. You did not mess with her.
Her best years, after the temporary father left the scene (but not her heart) was the years she spent with her best friend Mo. He saved her life, and she, his. What a pair, jitterbugging between icy pitchers at the Lions Club or Cascade Plunge.
I went to the same high school (Woodlawn in Birmingham) and had some of the same teachers. I went to the same summer camp. I walked where she had walked.
We broke her heart in 1974, when we moved away from Alabama with her 15 month old grand-baby–the girl she always wanted but got two boys instead. We saw her briefly, a time or two a year, until I convinced her to move to Virginia in 2016.
She visited us often, and we always knew it was our dogs she came to see, mostly.
And from then to the end, she watched us learn to leave Goose Creek. The steep terrain and long drive to town made us move from the bottom of a bowl to the top of the world on Rock Hill, 2020 – 2024.
And then, to our surprise, we moved again: this time, away from everything and everyone we had known so well. And as it turns out, we could not have done what was best for us if she had lived. Our own journey into senior care carried us to Missouri, where we have family help nearby–like she had with us in Floyd County while she lived in Blacksburg those final years.
I think about you every day, mom, and am so grateful you were able to share the good parts of our later lives. Now, we understand that aging is not for sissies. You certainly were not one. Your courage, your smile and your love still sustain me. You are not forgotten.
Happy Mother’s Day.
– Fred First is an author, naturalist, photographer watching Nature under siege since the first Earth Day. Cautiously hopeful. Writing to think it through. Thanks for joining me. Subscribe to My Substack HERE