Just finished up 2011 on the Flickr to WP blog project. And boy, in hindsight, it’s obvious why I ended up needing hand surgery. I was a busy bee. There were SO MANY photos of books that I made in these posts that I forgot about entirely, and were either sold or given away. I was also stitching and weaving. I wish I could conjure up some of that creative energy now. It’s been good to see that I am capable of all this, though.
Today is the anniversary of my father’s death, which was in 1986. However, this morning I was thinking about the day that I walked away from my mother, the last of her children to depart after the funeral. I felt her eyes on me long after I drove away, but maybe that was just me. She was pretty angry with me for minor stuff, like what I wore to the funeral, and we would have the worst fights of our lives for the next six months, saying awful things to each other that still haunt me. In my defense, the worst came from her. I really put up with a lot and tried to appease her, since I realized what she must be going through.
I wondered what she did after she turned and went back into her house that day. Did she sleep? Did she cry? She was living alone for the first time in her life.
Later, she thrived in her independence. She traveled without having to worry about my father or her children. She had part-time work as a temp for the local postal service and made enough money to get by. She could have married again to a boyfriend who she really loved, but decided against it because they lived about a hundred miles apart and neither wanted to move. She was the Queen Bee of Marietta, NC, and stayed constantly busy in church, community, and art groups. Her children actually worried about her doing too much when she hit her 80s, and she was, until back pain and frustration with computers slowed her down. She worked until she was 83 and had a huge garden until a couple of years after that.
I’m glad that we finally started getting along. I miss her. I think that Daddy would have been happy with the way her life continued after he died. On one hand, I wish she was here for me to turn to in these dark days. On the other, I am glad that she didn’t live to deal with it. She would probably be in a nursing home and miserable, and by the time she died she was ready to go.
I was proud of my mother. She lived her life fully. I was Daddy’s girl, but by the end, I was Mama’s girl too.
slowly she turned 