I'm reading this at an open mic night soon. The subject is "renewal." I'm considering it a long prose-poem, but who knows what that means.
So I’ve been thinking about my mom a lot lately. She’s in her early 90s and in tough shape.
A long time ago, my marriage was ending. I had moved to North Carolina, then three months after the big move, the one I’d hoped would mend our relationship, I found myself alone in a nearly empty rental truck driving back to Minneapolis with $500 in my pocket, my old chef’s knives wrapped in a dish towel, and a cast iron pan rattling in the back. We were poor. Dividing the household was easy.
I had grown distant from my parents. My dad was a Lutheran minister and my mom a minister’s kid; I’d left the church and struck out on my own; I felt they never quite understood or accepted this. The discomfort of our differences was enough to make reunions uncommon. Plus, they didn’t really like my wife that much and the feeling was mutual.
When it became clear even to me that the marriage was gone, I knew I owed my folks a phone call. Yet, I put it off and put it off until finally one night I told them I was returning to Minneapolis to start my life over again. And could I stay with them overnight in Illinois? And I’d be there in three days.
This was a shock to them because I’d kept my troubles hidden. I felt guilty that I couldn’t make the relationship work out. Divorce was frowned upon in my family and I feared their judgment. And, well, my heart was sore.
When I finally arrived, exhausted by sixteen hours on the road, I knocked on the door, dreading the explanations I knew they wanted. It was dark and cold and early November. Answering the knock, they welcomed me inside to a pot of soup and fresh bread. I told them I couldn’t talk, but just needed to rest and soak up the stillness. And to their credit they honored that request.
On my way to bed, mom pulled me aside and handed me a hefty bundle of cloth: a patchwork quilt, each block tied with bright red yarn in the corners. “So you can stay warm,” she said. “Winter is coming.”
I hugged her and thanked her and headed upstairs. Later, I learned she began work on the quilt immediately after my call and finished just before I arrived.
I pulled the quilt over me that night. Under it, I began to shed some of the layers of guilt and loneliness I had carried with me in that empty truck and through the months before. As I fell asleep, a new life seemed daunting, but not impossible.
Mom’s memories are mostly gone now. To the rest of the world she looks like an old lady; her past disappeared, her present infirmity all they know. But, of course, time erodes our stories and fades them, too: I know her as the one who speed quilted from scraps an island of warmth, who placed her morals on the high shelf, then let her fingers guide her heart.