Sketches

I grew up wanting to be an artist. As an elementary school student I waited earnestly to be recognized for my elaborate pencil drawings sketched out on the back of my school assignments. I specialized in horses–typically drawn from the side, nearly always facing left.

I inherited my right-brain tendencies from my mom, whose own creativity found expression in elaborate school bulletin boards, matching homemade dresses and vests (it was the early nineties), and puffy-painted sweatshirts. When I think of her now, it is often in the context of creation: veering wildly off-course on a dinner recipe (which she always maintained were merely suggestions anyway) and arriving somewhere magical, though rarely repeatable. Creating marvelous and overly-intricate gifts and assignments for her students that usually involved a full-family effort to complete. Sewing me a spider Halloween costume. Baking a birthday cake in the shape of a sea-monster swimming across the surface of a foil-covered tray. Devising a series of elaborate party games to entertain a cadre of 4th graders for hours. Scrapbooking our vacation photos on complex and colorful pages, complete with snippets and highlights pulled from the “literature” she had located on the brochure rack in the hotel lobby.

My mom had a mischievous streak that often ended with entire groups of previously unwilling participants going blithely along with her suggestions. On a Mississippi River houseboat trip with our (non-camping) relatives, my mother decided she wasn’t ready to go home yet on the night we were due to return our houseboat back to the marina. Somehow, our group of 12 found ourselves spending the night on a sandbank in the middle of the mississippi river, under the stars and a full moon, sans boat (and beds), sleeping on inner-tubes and beach towels. We awoke to a river swathed in mist, to the calls of birds and the faint pink of an early sun lifting itself out of the river.

She was a notoriously poor navigator, leading us astray onto roads that narrowed, then turned to gravel, and often dead-ended into leaf-strewn dirt paths in the forest, as she pondered the map from different angles.

I have never seen her successfully order fast food. No matter how simple the order, it always arrived wrong (she insisted she was cursed in this respect, though in defense of food service employees everywhere, it is a bit confusing to hear someone order a cheese burger without cheese).

She was a constant multi-tasker, though with debatable success. She was consistently running 15 minutes late (much to the chagrin of my timely engineer father), due in part to her unwavering belief that she could sweep the house, do a load of laundry, do her hair, and start the dishwasher in the 5 minutes before we needed to leave the house. She was famous for sweeping through the living room, all of us sitting in our coats waiting for her, and yelling “what are you all doing just sitting here? We’re running late!”

My mom hated heights. She tried purposefully to sleep her way across chicago’s skyway bridge on our trips to Milwaukee. She was a nervous passenger, but drove like a mad woman. She loved the taste of cherries, but would refuse to eat cherries themselves, picking around the fruit centers of the cherry cordial candies that she delighted in. Public speaking made her terribly nervous, but she was a firm and commanding teacher, both loved and obviously respected by her students.

My mom never really ‘got’ most comedy films, shaking her head as the rest of us cracked up over Will Farrell movies. She was two-beer tipsy at purdue games, made friends in the bathroom line, could spend an hour on the phone with her best friend that she’d just seen that morning, and baked wonderful cookies.

Despite our best efforts of persuasion, she loved holiday themes sweaters. She always kept mints in her purse, and rarely answered her cell phone (which she always forgot and kept on silent). She never mastered the tv remote, and had an oft-violated ceasefire with the technology in her life, which she insisted failed to live up to its promises.

She never let us quit anything we started, even if it meant she and dad spent every day of the week on the hard metal bleachers of the softball diamonds or basketball courts or swim meets or horse shows. She was quick to smile or cry or anger, and loved deeply and fiercely. She was stubborn in her self-assurance and world view, and passed that on to each of us.

Not a day goes by that I don’t see her somewhere. A turn of phrase out of my mouth, the desire for her perspective or excitement, the smell of cookies baking. Especially in February, I think often of the irreparable gap her passing has left in my life, and the growing awareness that, paradoxically, she is both the hole and the fabric.