My Mom

She should’ve been a pioneer. My mother. But they’d made their meals from nothing but a little flour, wrapped their dead in shawls, scratched out graves in the frozen earth, birthed their babies in the dirt, and gotten right back up to pull their handcarts years before she ever came on the scene. She could’ve done it though. She might have cried. And screamed to the heavens. And there would have been cursing (that Wallace temper didn’t come without a vocabulary). But she wouldn’t have complained. She would’ve strapped a baby to her breast, loaded someone who had given up into the back of her cart, pulled us kids right along with her; and forward would have always been the only direction worth considering. When I was small, in place of our usual bedtime reading of The Hobbit or The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, she’d occasionally turn thoughtful and tell me about an image (a dream? a vision? I do not think it’s too big of a word here) repeated in her mind since she was young. It was her, a small raft, and nothing but sea and storm. Rain. Wind. Waves. (I saw her there — as the image passed from her lips into my imagination. And that raft, I knew, was far from seaworthy.) All around her in the water were people. And her consuming focus? To pull them safely into her raft. It didn’t matter that there was no more room, or that the raft was half sinking under all the weight, or that her arms were shaking from the effort, or that she couldn’t catch her breath. Why would any of that matter to her? There were people to pull from the water. I’m older now. And so is she. And I know a little about who was in that water. Eleven kids. Two large refugee families. A dozen of our friends (probably more) with troubles at home and nowhere to stay. Kids and grandkids battling addiction and divorce. And a thousand others she couldn’t possibly fit in her raft but did anyway. I understand now that ease was never her pursuit. (Though there was abundance and there was joy. Freshly-made Christmas nightgowns—always with a forgotten pin left in them, that large Polk’s End backyard, peach cobbler, and all the days at Bear Lake.) But what did ease have to do with a life worth living? Grit. And faith. And whatever God asked of her. Those were the things. I see chunks of them in me. And in my daughters. And sisters. And nieces. They are parts of her. They are our inheritance.