Time was lost as I sat in the hard metal folding chair, gazing past the preacher, to watch a mother bird feed her nesting babies. All sound was silent, except for the chirping of their little voices calling out to their mother.
My attention was returned to the matter at hand, as someone caressed my shoulder and mumbled something. Now completely back in the moment, I stuttered a thank you. Some might think that my lapse of presence indicated a lack of emotion, but rather, it seemed to be a quite involuntary action the past few days.
It was just four short days ago that my phone had rang unexepectedly as I rushed along my daily routine. Short. No. Four extremely long days ago, rather, that one phone call set my world upside down. I had been rocking out to the evening radio show, stuck in construction traffic just as I had been stuck for two years straight. My phone rang with an unfamiliar number and while my first inclination was to ignore the call, something deep inside me urged me to answer the forth ring.
The deep, demanding voice on the other end called my attention. "Ms. Lathe. I'm Dr. Watts with Boltons Trauma Center. Ms. Lathe, I'm sorry but there's been an accident..." As hard as I try, my brain seems to have blocked out any other words spoken at that moment. And while I know that Dr. Watts told me that my mother had been killed in a head-on collision, I can not seem to recall how or exactly what was said. I just remember feeling the world slow as my heart began to race hard enough to pound out of my chest. I could feel the heat from the car vent as though it was trying to suffocate me and steal the breath from my lungs. I know that I was holding my cellphone to my ear, yet I could not feel my left arm. It's as if my mind somehow thought that if my hand was gone, it could not hold the phone, and therefore my mother could not be dead.
Somehow I managed to get the car off the highway and parked on a narrow side road before the shock of the news stung my eyes with burning tears and waves of sobs. I sat there for probably an hour before I felt I could utter those same words to anyone else. I was both relieved and anxious that I had no sibilings in which to share the burden of such news.
As I stared at my phone, I desparately tried to remember my husband-of-ten -years phone number. I managed to say, "Jim, Jim there's been..." before my voice cracked and no matter how hard I willed it to be strong, faded to a silenced murmer. Thankfully, being the good ole Jim that I loved so much, knew me well enough and knew that if I could not speak the words, whatever it was, it must be incomprehesible. His warm voice reassured me that it would be ok...that he was on his way... and once again, that it would be ok. I am still not sure just how he knew where to find me. And I can only vaguely recall the trip home in his car.
Once Jim tucked me into our warm bed, covered me with my mother's hand made quilt (that she had given me on my 21st birthday) and dimmed the lights, he took on the painful job of going to the hospital to identify my mother. Worried about my ability to process such a tradegy, on the hills of an emotionally draining miscarriage just 3 months prior, Jim had slipped me some of the sleeping pills the doctor had given me when our baby died at 27 weeks. I believe that I slept that night and most the next day, without stirring.
However, dreams flooded my sleep that first night. The first one was from my early childhood. It was so real, that I could hardly believe it was not reality. I could smell the watermelon and even taste it's sweet nectar as I sat on my mother's lap again as a five year old. The wind brought waves of pine and morning dew smells across our picnic table which was just off the blue ridge parkway. My mother had taken me to what she called "America's Castle", otherwise known as the majestic Biltmore Estates. She wanted to show me how the royalty lived. The Vanderbilt mansion was full of antiques of granduer and incomparable splendor. My mother and I lived in a small, well kept home in western Pa. She had been the daughter of a very successful shipping giant, much like the Vanderbilts. As a child, she had a life of leisure. Well, that is, until she met and fell madly in love with an olive skinned, black hair, blue eyed military man that her father said would love and leave her. Against her father's wishes, she married the poor military soldier in a small country church with only her weeping mother in attendence.
I had been a late-in-life baby to my mother when she was 45. I never really got to know my father well, yet he lived in me through the vivid memories my mother instilled upon my memory from the time I was old enough to listen to her stories. You see, my father died shortly after my 3rd birthday. He suffered a painful death brought on my a ravaging case of pancreatic cancer. So from a very young age, it was just my mother and I. I often wondered, as did others, if I needed her as much as she needed me to survive.
My mother never remarried. For 27 years, my father was my mother's reason for living. She would wake an hour before the sun to prepare a large breakfast for him. Anyone who ever tasted my mother, Isabel's, cooking before would be salvating right now at the mere mention of her food. When asked for a recipe, my mother would always reply, "My dear, love. Love is all I've added special". She told me that as long as I added love to anything I did, it would turn out. She must have had an abudance of love when it came to cooking and baking because her food would melt in your mouth. Wether it was an western omlet or a key lime pie, she had a way of twisting the ingredients and forming a masterpiece unlike anything a person had experienced. I heard a rumor once that Julia Child had paid my mother for a few of her recipes, but I never really believed it.
It was that passion for food that supported us after my father's death. My mother opened a small diner in our town. And she would cook lunch and dinner for the the locals at completely affordable prices. As a teenager, I often begged her to raise her prices so that we could have more money. She always had refused preaching to me that money could not buy happiness. She made just enough to pay a few employees, put some away in savings, and take two trips a year. Our trips were always by car and always to places my mother believed would enrich me culturally. Thus, our trip to Asheville NC to see the finer things in life at the famous Biltmore.
(here's where I stopped) The intent was for the daughter to go to her mothers house to "clean it out" and discover a chest- and find many treasures and secrets she never knew about her mother... some good... some shocking... but all that would lead her to a greater appreciation for her mother.
