Mother

“It frots. Frits.”

The late fall leaves skittered across the road in front of the car, brown and dry, the wind pulling them up here and there so they danced. My mother saw them and tried to name them. She couldn’t, she was nine long years into dementia and a few long months from dying, but I knew what she meant. How could I not see what she saw, what she had taught me to see?

***

Mid April already, and the wild plums
bloom at the roadside, a lacy white
against the exuberant, jubilant green
of new grass . . .
—from Ted Kooser’s “Mother”

The first stanza of Ted Kooser’s “Mother” lands just shy of too much, lacy white, jubilant green, the slight, specific details of a season shifting, which delights those who are watching, who take care to see. The second stanza opens bluntly—“You have been gone a month today”—and for me, a reader, the small excesses of the first stanza become the ache that particulars evoke when witnessed after loss. Kooser continues on to tell his mother what she has missed—three rains, the geese returning to the pond.

***

Kooser and his mother shared the landscapes of the Great Plains; my mother’s heartland was New England. We traveled outside it a few times, the requisite trips to New York and Philadelphia and D.C., but mostly we drove and drove the backroads of Worcester County and the Pioneer Valley, Connecticut’s Quiet Corner, up to Vermont and to New Hampshire and once, all the way to Maine. 

We stopped for presidents’ birthplaces and waterfalls and taverns and art museums, all capital-letter destinations, but looking back now, so much of what I have saved was lower case, unnamed: weathered barns, usually red, sometimes brown or grey; stolid cows, chewing cud and turning big heads our way at my mother helloooooed out the car window; trees budding, trees greening, trees turning yellow and orange and red; long tobacco sheds, mostly unpainted; winding fieldstone walls, and endless, countless dogs, there and there and there.

***

Most days, I walk my dog the same two miles of Salem, an egg-shaped route covering mundane ground no tourists seek out. And still, I am captured again and again, by a horse ring still embedded in the sidewalk, by ducks swimming around the shopping basket that emerges in the canal at low tide, by the wide porches built before cars clogged the street, by the ghost signs hovering on industrial brick. 

Salem is mine and not hers, but I know it because of how she taught me to see.

***

Kooser’s poem ends,

Were it not for the way you taught me to look
at the world, to see the life at play in everything,
I would have to be lonely forever.

This, when she has been gone four years, is what I call legacy. The way she taught me to look at the world. To see the life at play, which for me has been everything. 

Mother by Ted Kooser, from Delights and Shadows

Mid April already, and the wild plums
bloom at the roadside, a lacy white
against the exuberant, jubilant green
of new grass an the dusty, fading black
of burned-out ditches. No leaves, not yet,
only the delicate, star-petaled
blossoms, sweet with their timeless perfume.

You have been gone a month today
and have missed three rains and one nightlong
watch for tornadoes. I sat in the cellar
from six to eight while fat spring clouds
went somersaulting, rumbling east. Then it poured,
a storm that walked on legs of lightning,
dragging its shaggy belly over the fields.

The meadowlarks are back, and the finches
are turning from green to gold. Those same
two geese have come to the pond again this year,
honking in over the trees and splashing down.
They never nest, but stay a week or two
then leave. The peonies are up, the red sprouts
burning in circles like birthday candles,

for this is the month of my birth, as you know,
the best month to be born in, thanks to you,
everything ready to burst with living.
There will be no more new flannel nightshirts
sewn on your old black Singer, no birthday card
addressed in a shaky but businesslike hand.
You asked me if I would be sad when it happened

and I am sad. But the iris I moved from your house
now hold in the dusty dry fists of their roots
green knives and forks as if waiting for dinner,
as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that.
Were it not for the way you taught me to look
at the world, to see the life at play in everything,
I would have to be lonely forever.