Mother’s Day stroll

There is sheen to the land. Dew caught in the dawn, wet varnish: On the branches of the dogwood; the tin roof of a drive shed; on the holding wires tracing turned-up ground of a vine patch. A sweet scent of manure and earth; bitter ash from the fire of yesterday’s clean-up; last night’s road kill in the eye of a raven sentinel, 30 storeys up a limbering beech tree; it is the rise of a May morning.

Songbirds play to untrained ears; pigeons coo, skittish before the thunder of wings launches them to the rafters of Ross Goodmurphy’s barn. Mourning doves call me to mornings on tropical islands; meanwhile oranges, sliced in halves, spiked to a branch of the butternut tree by the old Johnston house have invited the orioles. High overhead a jet stream in the transcendent sky lingers home.

The creaking in my still-wintering knees reaches for the tempo of the songbirds: a dog bark beyond the ridge; the whine of the eighteen- wheel Giant Tiger transport that carries from a distant highway. It is a Sunday of memories for all of us. Wrapped up in a day of tribute are remembrances, of laughter, of childhoods young, of childhoods revisited later on.

I’d visit with my mom in her last years, there snoozing in her chair by the window, forest-red wool shawl covering her shoulders. Quietly, I’d sit down beside her; begin to whisper the songs that I could remember from her song book of younger years. She’ll be Comin’ around the Mountain; Take Me Out to the Ball Game; On MoonlightBay. I would be less than one verse into it when her lips would begin to move to the words, the lyrics drawing her awake; awake to a world less placid; a world now confused with the timing of Alzheimer’s. Nonetheless, the songs were still there and they brought comfort to both of us; even though she couldn’t always remember my name. You see that wasn’t important now. Seeing her smile to the songs of Sunny Side of the Street and Good Night Irene was. There in her adopted home on an island in the stream of the RideauRiver, in Ottawa.

And then there were the geraniums on the window sill. The ones dad and I brought from her real home to keep her company during her stay at her island place. ‘Cruising down the River’ was one of her favourites. The geraniums she kept winter after winter under light in the basement to haul them out in a ceremony for May 24. New season on the veranda; I learned to always ‘head’ the dead flowers and put used tea leaves in with the soil, “if you want really nice geraniums,” she’d say. And it worked: Cardinal; snow white; soft pink; Old geraniums that seemed to be around forever; Old geraniums now on my kitchen window sill.

So this morning, Jack Frost on vacation, we’re home alone to cheer the days without him. It’s our time. A time for renewal, a time for celebration of motherhood in our human family and in the robin’s nest: a time for verandas and geraniums, old and new. In the rear-view mirror, the years seem to line up like the split rails of the fence that go on forever on the ol’ Zufelt farm. Doesn’t matter that the mallards pay no heed to a stranger wandering the banks of the Mill Pond; remembering by remembering; ‘ take me out to the ball game, take me out to the crowd, buy me some peanuts and crackerjacks, I don’t care if I never get back, so we’ll root, root, root for the home team…’