“But there’s a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin.”
― Mitch Albom, For One More Day
What would I give for one more day or even one more hour with Momma? Pretty much anything. I’d love to be able to sit and laugh with her over the silliest of things –
Momma had a heart for her children, nothing was too great a sacrifice when it came to her kids and her grandkids. She loved us so much that at times I still don’t think we realize how much. She loved spending time with us and she always had a memory to share.
We’ve laughed over the unusual way I got around as a baby, she even shared it when our church had a graduation celebration my senior year of high school. See, I didn’t crawl, I would sit down on my bottom, grab my feet, and bounce. She’s told me dozens of times about how I was running through the house and tripped on the threshold crashing into an end table and gashing just below my eyebrow. She cleaned me up and put a butterfly bandage on it because she didn’t want me to have a scar from stitches. More likely she didn’t want to have to bribe me with a new Barbie to keep me from having a hysterical fit if she took me to the doctor. Then there’s the story about my older sisters and brother fabricating a story about living in a two story house. Momma was a single mother in the 1950s, Bubba was her right hand and was often in charge of “the girls”. When Momma was at work they weren’t allowed to have company inside. They told a neighbor girl that their single story house had an up-stairs. Naturally, she wanted to see inside and they had the perfect excuse not to let her in, “Momma’s not home.” They would go inside and stomp around like they were going upstairs.
When we got new carpet all of our furniture was out on the lawn, Momma and her youngest grandson, Brian, laid in the floor and rolled all over the house on the new carpet. Later, that same day, I caught her and Daddy kissing in the closet under the stairs. She shooed me away.
She was often called “Nurse Grandma” because she was always caring for our bumps and bruises. She would wait until a grandchild was sleeping and then carefully remove stitches. She could cure anything with peroxide, carbolated Vaseline, and Baby Percy medicine if you were human or egg and milk if it was an animal.
She had a white Persian cat with one green eye and one blue eye named Pitty-Pat, actually the cat was my oldest sister, Linda’s cat but right after she got the cat, she left for college. That cat lived to be 22, probably because she feed her buttered biscuits, which she would sit up and beg for. When she was a young girl, she had a wolf. She rescued three orphaned baby squirrels one time and built them a cage in our back yard, we had them for years,
Mother was so loving, kind, and patient, until she wasn’t. One time that comes to mind was the case of a half wild cat. Momma had been catching wild cats and having them “fixed”, this one old momma had a littler before Momma caught her and so the fun began trying to catch her and her wild babies. She finally managed to and was dipping them for fleas. One in particular was not having any part of this and had managed to stay just out of reach. Finally, hot dripping with flea solution and just a little irritated, Momma grabs the cat by the tail, snatches it up by the scruff of the neck and “baptizes” it. She pitched it down saying, “Well, now we know why God gave them handles.” I couldn’t stop laughing.
Momma loved to tell about her childhood and how she and her best friend, Monaree Goode would slip across the fence at night and ride the neighbors horse, because Momma knew how to make a hackamore. The neighbor couldn’t understand why his horse always seemed tired. She would tell about learning to play solitaire from an elderly lady that boarded with them and she and I would play for hours.
I always hated when she started out with, “Now don’t you dare laugh.”, that was a sure sign that I was going to laugh to the point of tears and she was going to threaten to “wear me out”, even though I was grown. Not too long before she passed, I walked into her office and she started out by telling me not to laugh. She proceeded to tell me about her adventure the night before. Some years before, Daddy had installed one of the old-fashioned oval shower kits in our big claw foot tub. Well, it seems that Momma had decided to take a shower in the middle of the night. By this time her Parkinson’s was pretty advanced and she wasn’t very steady. My Daddy was asleep across the hall and their little mutt had followed Momma into the bathroom. It seems that everything went just fine until she attempted to step out of the tub. Somehow she hung her foot and spun around at the same time thus falling backwards out of the tub. Now somewhere in this craziness she managed to catch the shower curtain between the back of her legs and the side of the tub creating a sort of hammock. Yeah, I lost it, I did ask her if she was hurt. After swatting me a couple of times she proceeded with her story telling me how she had tried to “hollar for Daddy” but by this point she didn’t have a very loud voice. Her next step was to try to get the dog to go wake him up, not. I honestly can’t tell you how she got out of the shower curtain hammock because by this time I was gasping for air and crying all while the smacked me on the arm. Momma, I’m sorry but it’s just one of my favorite memories.
Yes, I would give just about anything for one more day with my Momma, just one more hug, one more kiss, one more hug, and yes, even one more swat.
I love you Momma, till we meet again…….
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