Mother’s journal
We lived in a little log cabin that my parents built. A barn out back housed a variety of goats, fowl, a pig and whatever else my father had taken a fancy to or needed a home. From a toddler’s perspective, my early memories consist mostly of looking up the endless length of my mother’s legs, (I remain a fast walker to this day, thanks to trying to keep up with those stilts) standing at the bright red laminate kitchen counter, spatula in hand, her entire body churning along with the motion of mixing cookie batter. Back then, she only used half a bag of chocolate chips in her cookies. Hardly enough for the chocolate queen, but chocolate chips were expensive and my mother was, and remains, a frugal woman. (You give her a compliment on an item of clothing and she’ll tell you how she got it 80% off. Nothing beats the satisfaction of a good deal, except being able to tell someone about it.) We were allowed a small spoonful of batter as a treat, but sugar treats were a rarity in our house. Dried pineapple was an exciting dessert. Years later, my sister and I discovered that my mother had a secret cupboard full of chocolate that she would eat after we went to bed. My sister, as a result of her repressed sweet tooth, allows her children to have dessert whenever they please.
The sounds that accompanied our young lives in that house still live vividly in my memory: Mom sweeping the wood floors during nap time, the screech of the clothesline as she sent the wet laundry flapping across the way, the rope high above the ground stretching from the little balcony on the back of the house to the tall beech tree where the opposite pulley attached. In the winter the clothes would get snapped out of their wet mounds and hung indoors on the railings that opened to the second story of the house. Any visitors stopping by would be welcomed by a proud display of 70s era pants hanging on the top railing, shirts on the middle, skivvies and socks on the bottom. Always there was music. I have very early memories of watching the keys of the piano, pressing down in various patterns, the sound of a fingernail tapping against the ivory, and the red and yellow geometric shapes on the front of a Suzuki piano lesson book. From my vantage point with my head on my mother’s lap, the keys sideways, the light slanting across the piano from the window adjacent, my ears heard their first Mozart, and Beethoven, and Bach, and Chopin, the scores of my infancy plunked out by students or masterfully by mom. Other times there would be rehearsals for the Utica Symphony Orchestra, Margie playing her French horn, or her daily vocal exercises (no napping through those!), or just the impromptu six-part family sing-alongs that we were fortunate to experience. I had no idea that this wasn’t normal until much later in life. Music was a constant, whether at church on Sunday, where Mom played the organ and organized choirs, or in our living room where we had a steady stream of eager learners or semiprofessionals coming to rehearse, or the family singing “Snowflakes Falling”, a song composed by my mom. In the summer, my sister and I grew inches while waiting for Margie to play tennis down at the Adams’ court. Leaning against the fence, fingers laced through the links, bored with catching frogs, afraid of getting stung by wasps, we would ask over and over if she was done yet. “In a minute,” would be the response, until at least six more hours had passed. (At least it seemed that way. In reality it was probably 30 minutes and for her, saving her sanity, but one doesn’t understand this until becoming a parent.) After the weather turned, if she was lucky, Margie scraped together the money to go play tennis at the “fancy” tennis club in Utica called the Brookside. We would arrive in the 1960 something jeep pick-up truck, muffler blasting, gears churning, smelling like a mixture of exhaust and manure, and park next to a Mercedes or Jaguar. Margie would have her therapy of pounding a tennis ball, while Gladys the gym daycare lady fed me my liverwurst sandwich and first exposed me to the sands in the hourglass of “Days of our Lives”. Then we would roar home in the truck, Margie flooring the gas pedal as we sped past the Riverside Mall at about 80 mph, all in an attempt to gain enough speed to make it up Deerfield Hill without running out of steam. By the time we sputtered to the top we’d be in the slow lane, going about 25 mph until we would finally crest the hill and gain speed down the other side, often coasting to conserve gas. (Sadly, our situation didn’t improve with our next vehicle, a VW Rabbit.) After a busy day, sitting in the two armed chair placed under the dark brown rotary phone that hung on the wall, Margie would call her parents. Mothers have a special knack of soothing their little ones. I have one who likes to lie on my chest and listen to my heart while I stroke her hair. The other likes to have circles rubbed on his back. When I was a girl, unhappy with the lack of attention I would receive while my mother was on the phone, I would climb into her lap and curl onto my side, thumb in my mouth. She would trace the shape of my ear, gently, rhythmically, lovingly, until I would drift off, secure in our little world, rebuilding the energy I would later need to keep up with those long legs.