A Mary Lou kind of day

I cooked three meals on my new panini press. I went to church long enough to sing the choir anthem and play the tambourine, and then I left. On my way home I stopped at Linder's Garden Center, which was giving 15% of my purchase to Xingu's school so I could of course crookedly justify spending more than I should have. I came home, saw Xingu off with a friend and Krang off to some bicycle-related errands, and then I spent hours in the sun -- working on my front border and pruning the bejesus out of my failing forsythia.

Some differences from Mary Lou: (1) I was alone. Mom always had a couple of kids around when she was outside, which was damn near all the time. (2) I was wearing sunscreen. My mother never, ever wore sun protection apart from the occasional goofy hat, and after spending two-thirds of her life in Arizona she was spectacularly wrinkled. Sixty years of smoking helped on that score as well. (3) I was listening to my iPod (The Yeomen of the Guard, Bach B-minor mass, Tommy Quasthoff's jazz album, my Stafford Dean play list).

It was sunny, clear and cool today -- the sort of day we almost never had in Arizona. Our old dog Gromit was near me, always in the sun, while I was out. I dug dandelions, trimmed grass with hand trimmers, uprooted tiny trees, planted a new variety of heat-tolerant (there's one born every minute, isn't there) lobelia, fretted over the tiny red insects that have already started in on the salvia. Nothing in the border is blooming; shall I use the poison? shall I?

The lilacs are post-peak but still fragrant. Mom visited several years at Mother's Day, and usually the lilacs were just opening when she was here. It makes me sad that she never met Krang and never knew Xingu; she would have adored both of them.

In 2000, at age 40, with my mother newly dead and divorce proceedings underway, I had to face the likelihood that I would not, after all, get to be a mother. And yet I was not ready to accept it, and I looked for loopholes, strategies and signs. I told myself that if the forsythia bloomed that year, it would be a sign from my mother -- whose favorite color was yellow -- that I would, indeed, have a child.

And it did, and I did, and tonight I'm raising a glass of prosecco (okay, maybe four or five; it's not bourbon, so that's another departure from Mary Lou style) to my mother, and to Krang's mother, and to Momo -- the recently departed mother of my sister in law -- and to the generations of women in these our families who have dug in the dirt and gotten too much sun and told the same stories over and over again and loved their children beyond all measure.