Mooring Fever

STRANGE SPRING
Random Musings

My mom with her eldest grandson. June 1995, high school graduation.

I'm sitting in my mother's apartment this fine May afternoon. She is near death--how near is anybody's guess--and seeing her so debilitated is surely an illusion. My feisty, independent, capable 95-year-old mother lies nearly helpless on a gel pad, soothed by a low dose of morphine, as we sit beside her assessing her pulse, breathing, measure of peace. She sleeps almost continually--but when awake communicates with tiny smiles, blinks and the occasional eye-roll directed at this or that caregiver.

A little while ago I told her I'd just had a shot of Vitamin B-12 .(We grow desperate for conversational fodder.) When I asked if she hadn't once had one, too, when I was little, she nodded. "Did it help? " By way of an answer, I got the nose-wrinkle that translates in MomSpeak to "meh." I mention my son's name and she makes instant, sharp eye contact. Mom loves her grandsons.

Monitoring my mother's state of being is not the only observation taking place these days. I watch my sister, as I have for months, years on end, in awe. She has been Mom's full-time advocate, serving with skill and grace. How did she learn this craft? Like her mother before her, she has the natural gift.

Beautiful May, crowning a splendid St. Louis spring. What a strange spring it's been, though, a dance of birth and approaching death. Concurrently, a season of upheaval, beginning actually in January, brought on by solid months of home improvements, inside our house and out. Dust and racket, workers in and out, packing, unpacking, repacking. Where the hell IS my toothbrush this week? In the end, totally worth it. Love our updates, especially the new wall color: Peach Dip. 

But for four months my brain has been a tangle and I feel permanently unfocused. Can't concentrate. Maybe the B-12 will do a better job on me than it did on Mom.

Michigan? Mooring Fever did descend in February, right on schedule. By now I'd normally be heading up I-196, saluting each landmark as I pass. Instead, I've remained in St. Louis and Howard has returned, to support me along this journey with my mother.

I stay in the moment, holding her hand, and together, we wait.

****

Now something I wrote in 1999, delivered at Eliot Chapel:

CREDO

This week I brought in the last of the peonies: a white, a pink, a deep rose. By now the peony bushes look like the other flowers in our perennial bed, overblown, dragged down by their own weight. This is always a poignant time of year for me, albeit my favorite--for its lush softness, for its unabashed color and fragrance and hope and promise, that I anticipate through interminable March days, and which ends so quickly.

May is the moment in which I feel most blessed. My birthday falls in May. It would be difficult, I imagine, for anyone observing a May birthday to ignore the floral fireworks that nature seems to ignite expressly for the birthday child's benefit. I plead guilty to a frisson of chosen-ness when I survey the spring flowers exploding in tribute to moi.

 Then I think about how I happened to get my peonies, and my perspective snaps smartly back where it belongs. The deep rose blossom comes from the Illinois farm that my father loved more than any place on earth. The white blossom--overwhelmingly the fragrance favorite--comes from a spot next to the foundation of a clapboard farmhouse on Lemay Ferry Road...home to my mother's family for nearly 150 years, and home to the ancestor of this very white blossom for at least 100 of those years. The pink blossom, whose name is Eleanor Roosevelt, and the only one in the garden whose name I know, is a newcomer, a birthday gift from my husband the first spring of our marriage. Each of these flowers lives in my garden today because someone loved me enough to go to the trouble of providing them.

Eleanor and friends, a bit past their prime.

There's nothing subtle about a peony, that Sadie Thompson of the spring garden. Hardiness is what you'd expect from so blatant a bloom, yet peonies don't like to be transplanted. My peonies, however, have all been transplanted at least once, and actually survived a nine-month tenancy in the flower bed of a dear friend, who took them in when we had to make a double move and couldn't bear to leave the peonies behind.

Through the various uprooting and transplanting, our peonies have managed to bring their friends along. Hidden among the peony eyes have been other roots and bulbs and corms, yielding surprise bouquets of jonquils, columbine, poppies, iris and phlox. The garden has also been expanded by my son, that keen observer of his sentimental mother, who has honored my recent birthdays with gifts of lilac bushes and a mock orange to replace the one that was bulldozed a couple of years ago, along with the house I grew up in. I look forward to the day when I put spade to earth, dig up a few precious shoots, place them in a sturdy cardboard box and, carrying on the tradition, deliver them in a very old car to my son's garden, for surely he will have one.

But perhaps not. The perennial garden, after all, teaches no life lesson more eloquently than that of its unplannable  nature. I smile at this, for I take comfort in it, and pull myself back into the glorious moment. I look at my flowers, inhale their almost impossible fragrance, and I'm overwhelmed with gratitude. For their beauty, for my life, for my May birthday in the passage of that life, for my husband and son, whose love and understanding astonish me... and for the inexorable force connecting these threads of life across all people and all cultures, and through all time.

*****