For Mother’s Day, 2020.
Mama! This is my twelfth year without you, and still you are teaching me about time, sand through hands, losing what I love most, the beauty of iris on a one day bloom, your books unfolding secrets, toasted walnuts in apple crisp, the steel in your voice when you knew what you wanted, the way you did not back down, the way you were scared, the ways you looked at your body with care, or fear, or loathing, the way you loved me without hesitation.
Mama, there is a pandemic. A pandemic! We are afraid to be close to each other, and every time I go out, I worry I might bring an invisible virus home that could harm Dad. Could you ever imagine a pandemic? We can’t use essential oils to cure this thing, though I’m sure you’d try. You’d know the exact blend of clary sage and cinnamon or lavendula and rosemary, you’d know a language for healing that nobody else could parse until you expressed it for us. The oils would help. But they wouldn’t be all.
Mama, this world would boggle you, I think. Essential oil stores in malls. Nutritional yeast gone mainstream. Women-owned businesses, like you fought so hard to create in your own life, blossoming everywhere, fighting harder just to survive. And in the shade of this pandemic, so much death. So much falling to compost to become new life.
Mama, I moved home. We made a new compost pile and revived your garden. Your hands are everywhere, your cats still somehow, miraculously, alive.
I keep returning to this one absurd fact of you, though, that somehow, running a full-time business, raising me, nurturing a marriage, you also made three meals for us each day. Three. Every day. We came together every day at dinner. You did not flinch. You did not turn away. You did not throw the pan out the window. You let the food heal you, teach you, guide you. You remembered what we needed, to be together over something vital. You knew a common language would always taste like love. Lettuce as laughter. Ribbons of carrot as regret. Cucumber a juicy yes. You taught me how to speak it, too.
Mama is a name I didn’t give you until after you left, when they say it’s easy to deify the dead.
I love you.
You keep loving me.
