Final Instructions for Princesses

In 1949, at the annual Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival in Winchester, Virginia, my mother was one of thirty-eight princesses representing colleges throughout the south. Princesses rode atop a float made of real flowers. They wore identical long white gowns, a dress you might get married in. In one photograph, a luncheon with a guest of honor, my mom is one princess away from Bob Hope.

When my mother died, there was vomit in her hair.

~

What I know about my mother’s early life, before she married and had kids: She had an older brother, Lee, and two younger sisters, Shirley and Robyn. Of the girls, all attractive, Caroline was the beauty.

On Sundays, the children sat through two services. Their mother Dorothy directed the choir. Their father, Rob Roy Peery, was the church organist and a composer of religious music; some of the hymns in the hymnal had his name on them. While their parents carried out these roles every Sunday, the kids behaved.

Then there was Sunday dinner, early afternoon, fine china, napkins on laps, the mood somber.

After dinner there was a Sunday tradition. My mother’s father chose a daughter to go upstairs with him, to “take a nap.” My mother recalled being chosen often. She remembered the fondling.

Sometimes, their father utilized a different tactic. If anything had gone awry during the mealtime, or if anyone had exhibited behavior during the previous week that required discipline or punishment, that daughter would be brought upstairs for a “spanking.” These were administered with his bare hand on their bare bottoms. They were teenagers.

Some Sundays, an uncle would come to visit, and select a niece to join him on a “Sunday drive.” The idea was to be happy you’d been chosen, to be the niece underneath whose skirt the uncle would like to diddle.

Surely Rob Roy knew what his brother was up to on these drives. Was this what daughters and nieces were for?  

The myth passed down in our family was that Dorothy, my mom’s mom, believed sex was for procreation only, so it stood to reason Rob Roy felt sexually deprived, hungry. But was sex so abhorrent to her that she preferred him molesting their daughters? Was that not more abhorrent? Had her own girlhood included incest, so that maybe fathers fondling daughters was normal to her? Did she somehow not know? Or looked the other way? And what layer of Christian obedience had to be indoctrinated into these children to have them swallowing these perverse versions of Sunday rituals?

Memorialized in her college scrapbook was the highlight of The Apple Blossom Festival. In one of the photos, Bob Hope is biting a big candy apple on a stick. In another, Bob Hope is kissing the festival queen on the mouth. The caption: “The Queen and Hope in an unrehearsed moment after the festivities.” Unrehearsed is I guess one way of putting it.

In her junior year, my mother transferred from Roanoke to Gettysburg, where she crossed paths with my father, Melvin Bishop, a couple years older.  He was attending college on the G.I. Bill after two years in the army. My mother told my father, when he first asked her out on a date, that she was booked for the next five weekends and he told her he would pick her up that Saturday night at 6.

She subsequently cleared her dance card.

There were letters from Mel to Caroline during the following summer, when he was living with his parents and selling, door-to-door with his brother, Filter Queen vacuum cleaners.  Caroline, I miss you in the worst way, he wrote.

In July, he visited her, in Merion Station, Pennsylvania, where the Peery family lived. My grandmother chaperoned their every moment together (if only she’d been so vigilant during the Sunday naps…), even accompanied them to a riverside park for a romantic picnic. To get some time alone, my father rented one of the canoes. My grandmother was frightened of water, or didn’t swim—for whatever reason, she was unable to go with them. They paddled away, and had sex for the first time, maybe in the woods on shore, maybe in a bobbing canoe. They got presentable again and headed back to where Dorothy Peery was waiting. Melvin left the next day on the train back home to Virginia.

Six weeks later, just before her senior year, a couple months from her 21^st birthday,  Caroline realized she was pregnant. Quick arrangements were made for a wedding. Her mother was livid; she’d disgraced the family name. Her college days were over; her degree a year shy of complete. This was not how any of them would’ve wanted it. The wedding photos had none of the allure of the photos from the glory days in Winchester.

Rob Roy Peery, far left.

~

There was no honeymoon. I guess the assumption was they’d already had that. They took a train back to Virginia where my father’s parents, Sam and Madoline Bishop, lived. Until they could afford their own apartment, they would live with them.

My mother’s Princess days were replaced by the more mundane experience of motherhood and domesticity—raising babies, keeping house, cooking, sewing, all the while maintaining her appearance, the beauty and style that had lured my father in the first place. It was about five years before she got her picture in the paper again.

They were living in Nashville; he was getting his PhD at Vanderbilt. With Linda age four, Laurel almost three, and Larry a baby, my mother didn’t have enough hands. She invented the Tote-a-Babe, using her Singer sewing machine to make a sturdy baby holder, with a long strap worn diagonally across her. The seat part went high up on the baby’s torso, keeping him from falling out. This invention allowed her to travel by train to visit her parents, while holding the hands of both her girls and wearing her young son.

Before long, her neighbor wanted a Tote-A-Babe, and soon my mother was taking orders for these crafty mother’s helpers. The local newspaper, The Tennessean came out to do a story, and in the photos, my brother Larry is suspended there, chubby legs dangling. My mom and the neighbor are hanging up laundry on parallel clotheslines. They’re well-dressed, for the newspaper article, but also because this was the era when you had to look nice, always, because if you let yourself go, or wore your nightgown all day while nursing the baby, or didn’t put on your makeup, your husband would stray, and it would be your own fault.

My mother and Baby Larry are on the left.

My grandmother’s disappointment in my mother for the out-of-wedlock pregnancy never dissolved. The invention of the Tote-a-Babe, and resulting newspaper coverage, did not earn back for my mother any respect from hers. 

Second grade: In an effort to get all the kids to keep their rooms neater, my mom held a contest Those with the neatest room on a given morning would win a prize. I shared a room with Laurel; Linda shared with the baby, Cathleen; Larry, as the only boy, had his own room. Laurel and I won. My mom brought us to the local strip mall, which had a Hallmark type gift shop. Up at the cash register there was a display with little bug pins poked through it. Just tiny replicas—lady bug, bumble bee, spider—fastened to a long straight pin. We were each allowed to pick one. I chose the common housefly.

The next day we wore them to school, and when it was time to get off the bus, my fly pin had disappeared. I searched where we were sitting, and after all the other kids got off the bus, Laurel helped me look under the seats and in the aisle, but it was nowhere. Agony descended. I could not imagine going through the long day, without my mother, without being able to tell her I’d lost something so dear. Exiting the bus, descending the three stairs, I was ill inside. I did not cry publicly. But my heart was somewhere on the heavily-trodden aisle of that yellow bus. Stifling grief was a thing I learned, an instruction that doesn’t serve.

~

It was Friday, October 3, 2008, around 1pm, when Patrick Haven showed up on the caller I.D. This was the care home where my mom had lived the last eleven months, in Prescott, AZ, near where my husband and I lived.

“Come quick,” the woman said. “Your mother is dying.”

 I made it there in seven minutes, rushed through the living room to my mother’s room.

“You can’t come in here!” the mean nurse said, pushing me out.

“I need to see her,” I insisted.

“It’s too late,” she said. “She’s gone.”

~

When I was nine years old, summer before fifth grade, I went to stay with my mother’s parents in Dayton, Ohio.  A few years prior, my sisters Linda and Laurel had travelled there together by train. Now it was my turn.

In my mind, the three weeks I would be at my grandparents rolled out before me like a great book. I romanticized myself as Heidi or Sara Crewe, girl heroes from books I’d read. I imagined what my days would consist of: I would wake, wash my face, make my bed, then go to the kitchen for some cereal. I remembered there was a creek, a short walk from their house. I would go there every day to put my feet in the cold water.

It was my first time alone on a plane. The airline was Delta; the stewardess was kind; and the dress I wore was green and purple, from the Sears catalog. I had always been prone to motion-sickness—in cars, planes, boats, even a park swing. I knew about the bag, plastic-lined, in the seat back pocket in front of me, but I was too embarrassed to pull it out.

After many minutes of turbulence, the vomit shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did—a small puddle on the lap of the green dress. I put the airplane blanket over it. A few hours later when we landed, it was a whitish, wet spot, some of it having soaked into the blanket. I remember the stairs they rolled up to the plane’s door, going down them and seeing my Grandmother waiting for me out on the runway. She smiled and waved. I went for a hug.

“Did you get sick on the plane?” she said, and I nodded.

“No matter,” she said. “We will put that dress in the washing machine.”

~

The anticipation of this visit was way better than the reality. The worst part was the morning I woke up and longed to go home. My grandmother found me crying, inconsolable. “You’re homesick,” she pronounced. “Would you like to call your mother?” I nodded. We would do that, she said, that night, when long distance rates were lower.

Homesick. She had named it for me. Homesick was what I’d felt when I lost the pin. Homesick was a thing I would now recognize, and the notion of home was drenched in mother.

Grandmommy dialed as I stood by. I remember hearing my mother’s voice, her simple hello the auditory equivalent of rescue. I said a few words, answered a few questions, gave my grandmother back the phone.

There was no going home early. Airline tickets were expensive, and the dates were already set. The visit stretched out long after that.

Bedtime at my grandparents went like this: All evening, I would be next to my grandfather in bed, where he spent most of his time, chronically ill. My grandmother served him his meals in bed on a tray. I played cards on the bed while he watched TV. He taught me every kind of Solitaire I know—regular, King, and Pyramid. My Grandmother spent this evening time in the living room, reading her Bible. Half hour or so before my bedtime, she’d come in and tell me it was time to get ready for bed. I’d run and put my nightgown on, and then she’d let me play cards on their bed till it was time to sleep. Sometimes, he would tell me to lie down so he could scratch my back. This felt good.

One night, when it was time to get ready for bed, he said, “I want you to do something for me. Don’t wear any panties under your nightgown. It’ll be our secret.”

His suggestion, like warm vomit in my lap, was easier to ignore than acknowledge.

Near him in bed for another half hour, until the Perry Mason theme song came on, he told me to lie face-down, my head away from him and toward the TV. He would tickle my legs, then go up under the nightgown to scratch my back.

“You didn’t do what I asked you to do,” he said. “It’s okay. Next time.”

I continued to wear the underwear.

My last night with them, when it was time to kiss him goodnight, he said, “Now I’m going to show you how you will kiss boys when you grow up.” And he stuck his tongue in my nine-year-old mouth. Sick for as long as I’d known him, frequently hospitalized with pneumonia, he was often coughing things up into tissues. I didn’t want the inside of his mouth in mine.

“This is practice for later,” he said.

My grandfather and me, in an unrehearsed moment.

~

After college and graduate school, I got a teaching job at Prescott College. It was the first summer, 1992, when my mother visited me. I had been through a difficult breakup and it was a comfort to have my mom around. A few years earlier, she’d been through a rough time also, a temporary separation from my father that I only knew about peripherally. She’d left him and gone to live with her sister Shirley in Michigan. For several months, she stayed there and saw a therapist about her marriage, and in the course of this therapy, other issues resurfaced.  She’d returned to my father and he retired shortly after that and they moved to Austin, where their marriage improved significantly.

We were in the living room of my apartment, and it was evening, and she asked me something about the breakup. I gave a short answer, and she said, “You probably don’t feel like talking about it.” Then she said she wanted to tell me something, and the remembered incest came out. The various Sunday rituals.

“Did he have sex with you?” I said.

She said no. She said it was “fondling”.

“I pushed it out of my mind for a long time,” she said. “I repressed it.”

Then she asked me if my grandfather had ever tried anything with me. And I told her, about the one gross kiss, the request that I not wear underwear under my nightgown.

“I never should have sent you or Linda or Laurel to visit there by yourselves. That was wrong and I regret it.”

I’d bought an antique chair at a second-hand store and it had an ornate pattern cut into the chair back. A whole top layer of the wood on the carved pattern was peeling off. My mother knew she could not fix my failed relationship or my broken heart; could not reverse or fix the horror of the situation she’d endured, but she was determined to fix something, and she went off to the craft store. It was her last night in town.

She came home with some strong glue and a special clamp and she went to work on the antique chair, careful to maintain and protect the intricacy of the carved-out pattern, as she glued back the part of the wood that had separated off. She’d refinished a lot of antique furniture in her time and knew what she was doing. I watched her; she was entirely focused on this reparation.

In the morning, just before I was to take her to the airport, she released the clamp and the glue had held and the chair was made whole.

~

In 1997, my father was diagnosed with Stage Four Bladder Cancer. Devastating for us all. He lasted thirteen months. A year after he died, the family gathered near Destin, Florida to put his ashes in the Gulf of Mexico. Larry and Mom had flown together from Austin and he told us that when he went to pick her up for the airport, she not only wasn’t ready, her room was a disaster and she was packing odd things, unable to complete the task. He helped her close and zip the bags, while she protested that she didn’t have everything she needed. “We’ll miss our flight,” he said, and she put her shoes on and grabbed her purse, and he brought 3 pieces of luggage out to his car.

On the morning we were going to do the ashes at dawn, Cathleen gave us each a prayer box on a chain, where we could keep a tiny bit of what remained of him. Laurel opened the container and we took turns, each dipping our prayer box inside to get some. Mom was beginning to look scared, or lost, like it was just now hitting her what we were all doing here in Florida, where we’d vacationed as a family. I filled the little chamber in Mom’s necklace for her and fastened it around her neck. She became squeamish. People started reaching in for a handful, Larry first. I watched him walk into the water up to his thighs, his hand in a careful fist, and then he threw the ash as high up into the air as he could. I plunged my handful into the water right where I stood and opened my fingers to watch it disperse and blend.

Mom was next to me. “What do I do?” she said, and the question was about far more than this moment. She began to sob, looking down at her palm, now wet with salt water, the charcoal of what was left of him turned to a dark and chalky paint. She held out her hand, fingers splayed, and stared at it there, the horror on her face at first a recognition of the permanence with which he’d left us, and then a helplessness, like at the level of how, amidst such sorrow, to get rid of this mess on her hand?

“Rinse it in the water,” I said gently. She cried, big and gasping; she let it all go.

~

I visited Mom frequently in Austin after that and her decline was rapid and obvious. On one visit, she told me she rarely cooked anymore, but in honor of my arrival, she’d made a meat loaf. It was still in the oven and she asked me to check on it. She told me if it didn’t taste like it was supposed to, that was because the breadcrumbs had bugs so she had to throw them out. The eggs, she said, were also “a little old.” Expiration date, Feb. 16^th. This was mid-June.

She was disoriented and thrown off by my presence. It was like she knew who I was and  that she used to enjoy my company, but now I was standing in the way of her normal, solitary routine. “I never boil water in that!” she said, about the tea kettle on her stove. “I guess it’s okay, but I never do it.”

“Don’t wipe your hands on that!” she said, about a dish towel hanging on the oven door.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“That’s what I clean my glasses with!”

One evening after going to bed at 7, she came out of her room at 8pm, saying she’d just taken double doses of Vicodin and Zoloft. She’d taken her evening meds, gone to bed, woke up and the clock said 7:30, so she thought it was morning, and took her morning meds. Then she asked me, “How do you know when you look at a clock if it’s a.m. or p.m.?”

Toward the end of my visit, I made us a dinner of rice and black beans with vegetables and salad. Everything was fresh. We ate in the living room, Mom in her chair and me on the couch, plates on our laps as we watched old Waltons reruns on TV. Happy in that moment, my mother said, “Don’t you just love meals where you don’t have to sit in a circle?”

~

Some days she seemed okay, others she woke totally disoriented. One such morning, she was thrown off by the pharmacy telling her refills of her meds wouldn’t be delivered till 9am. It was 7. She thought that an interminable amount of time.

Trying to calm her, I went about my routine of making coffee with my Melitta drip. “Why was your cup out, like you had already had your coffee?”

“Oh, I put both our cups out last night, when I unloaded the dishwasher, just to get it set up for morning.”

“Well, that should’ve been good!”

I didn’t know what to say, what she meant.

“But it wasn’t! Because look what happened! The meds aren’t coming for hours!” The late delivery in her mind was punishment for something we’d done or not done.

Test results came back. She shouldn’t be driving, using a stove or a credit card; she could not administer her own medications. The doctor recommended Assisted Living.

~

Imagine the depth and scope of my mother’s homesickness. Her five children were independent adults and her husband had died. She was moved, against her wishes, from where they’d lived the last 10 years in a condo in Lakeway, Texas to a local assisted living. She was moved again, from a 2BR to a 1BR apartment there. She was moved from there across the country to Asheville, NC, near Laurel and Cathleen, to a similar assisted living. Moved from there back across the country to be near me in Prescott, Arizona—a small care home with six other residents, two bathrooms for them all to share.

With each move, we’d had to pare down her stuff. By the time she came to Arizona, she came with three suitcases and a few boxes. The personal belongings, articles that helped her know who she was, decreased with each relocation. She was forever looking for something. Where’s my _____? I can’t find my ______.  Do you have my _____?

The more she felt her belongings dwindling, the greater her need to accrue things. One of the main things I did for her was shop, and each time I saw her, she had a post-it note list of what she needed. Usually the same items appeared on the list over and over, things I’d bought her last week that she wasn’t yet out of, but it had become easier to just let her stockpile hand cream, butter-rum lifesavers, and those bendable drinking straws . All of this some odd artillery against loss.

 “Oh, and get me some stamps,” she said as I was leaving her room.

“Okay,” I said. “Any kind in particular?”

“No, just the regular kind.”

“You want love stamps?” She usually liked the ones with hearts.

“Any kind will do.”

I came back with a sheet of postage stamps, wildflowers on them.

“Not these!” she said. “The kind you put on a cut!”

It took me a minute. “Band-aids,” I said.

“Yes.”

While frustrating, I found it fascinating precisely how the brain was malfunctioning. In this case, in the part of her brain that dealt with vocabulary and object recognition, a file titled “Things with adhesive. Things that stick.”

~

That Friday in October 2008, they finally let me into the room where my mother lay dead. After she’d collapsed on her way to the bathroom, the staff had only been able to get her partway onto her bed, so from the knees down, her legs dangled, white socks and white sneakers still on her feet. Her left arm, to keep it from hanging off the bed, had been placed above her, bent at the elbow and cocked up at an unnatural angle. Her teeth had been removed and were visible in the open drawer of the bedside table. The room reeked of vomit, an odor they’d tried to mask with a French Vanilla air freshener—sweet, artificial, nauseating.

Rosie brought me a chair and then a cup of tea. Rosie was the mean R.N. who, with her husband John, ran the place. 

“She threw up?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s very common at the end.”

I didn’t ask how it had gotten in her hair. 

After the nurse left, I shut the door. I unlaced my mother’s clean, new, white tennis shoes, and pulled them off her slender feet. I put the shoes on the floor and then carefully removed each sock. They’d left lines on her lower leg, where the elastic was binding. No need for this anymore. Strange how quickly everything becomes useless.

At some point, Ted walked through the door and there were two of us sitting by my dead mother’s side, two of us making necessary decisions, Ted making the calls, turning mean nurse away at the door, saving me from having to do the hardest day of my life alone. 

We slipped the gold watch off her wrist. I would later notice the hands had stopped at 1:07pm, from what I could figure, the same time her heart had. She was 42 days shy of her 79^th birthday.          

Not long after my father took his last breath, May 22^nd, 1998, I’d climbed onto his hospice bed and lay there. I didn’t have to worry anymore that I’d jostle his sub-dermal pain med needle, that he was in pain and fragile. I held him and let the sobs move through me. Now I had the urge to do this with my mother, and I said that to Ted, but told him I was hesitant.

“Do it,” he said, “So you won’t regret it later.”

She’d stopped liking expressions of physical affection, would stiffen when I’d hug her, never hugging back. She would look at me askance if I gave her a kiss on the cheek, like it was some kind of perversion. She’d always been a very affectionate mother, until the dementia made her into someone else.

I got up and crawled over her in the bed, carefully lying down by her right side. She wore her long flannel nightgown. She was soft. Crying, I put my arm over her in a hug, and buried my face in her hair, then pulled back from the smell of vomit. This brief attempt to snuggle, my last ever opportunity to experience her in this physical, tactile way, was the first time in many years she’d not resisted.

~

When the men from Cooke-Walden came for her, the tiny room couldn’t fit anyone else. We had to leave so they could wheel in the stretcher, get her onto it and out the door. 

~

While she lived at Patrick Haven, my mother ordered a talking doll from a Christian catalog; You flip a switch on the doll’s back and she recites a bible verse. She knows about five but sometimes gets stuck on one. My mom liked to show the doll to me and anyone else who came to her room. Then she bought a stuffed animal called Lullaby Lamb, and the doll and the lamb had to be located each night before sleep, found wherever they were tangled up in her blankets and sheets, and put next to her for bedtime. One day she told me that she couldn’t find the lamb anywhere, prayed about it, and then realized she was lying on it. She said that the doll and the lamb were the best part of bedtime, that and the Trazadone.

It’s surprising to me that my mother remained Christian her whole life, that she didn’t reject a doctrine that her parents had interpreted to allow sexual abuse/incest. She did eventually reject the Lutheran church for a non-denominational congregation she referred to as a “Live” Church. “Live,” when I attended with her once while visiting, meant new words to old hymns, projected onto a big screen at the front. It meant services in a gymnasium, with a rock and roll band and people shouting out Hallelujah. She no longer wanted anything to do with Lutherans or Episcopalians, Baptists or Methodists.

Long after she died, 9 years after, when I was finally capable of going through all her things stored in our basement, I found a note to God in her journal: Please Lord, let the lamb and the doll go with me to Heaven.

I can’t dispense with them ever. They sit together on a bookshelf in my study. I fix it so they are entwined—the lamb’s head locked under the doll’s arms.

~

I don’t remember driving home from Patrick Haven, the day my mother died. There would’ve been two cars there. Did I follow Ted in my car, or ride with him and go back for the car at some later point? I do remember at home, lying on the couch, stricken, ill, the tears a chronic leak. Someone from work knocked on the door; Ted sent them away.

That kind of sad where you want to not wake up again.

~

As Roanoke’s Apple Blossom Princess, my mother had received a series of letters from the Festival Committee, instructing princesses on every aspect of the weekend, from wardrobe to itinerary to the dos and don’ts of Princess behavior. The last of these letters was titled “Final Instructions for Princesses.” As if the festival might be the last thing any of them ever did. As if being a princess were fatal.

When I found and read this in my mother’s scrapbook, I was an adult and my parents were both still alive. I was visiting them. I was not then, nor had I ever been, a princess. I was messy, outdoorsy, no fashion sense, never wore makeup. I was a writing professor and the editor of a small literary magazine. I asked my mother if I could make a copy of the document, folded up in its original envelope all these decades. Instead, she made a photocopy for herself, and gave me the original, thrilled that I’d found something of hers so fascinating.

Losing your mother is a bad case of homesickness for the rest of your life. A thing you must get used to because she isn’t coming back. It’s been fourteen years for me, and it still hurts. When do I feel it? When I do anything she taught me to do. Separating eggs, catching the yolks in one half of the shell, as the whites fall into a dish. Cutting out the individual sections of a pink grapefruit half. It comes flooding over me, the feeling of her, and then, the deep, gaping missing. 

It happens whenever I see her handwriting—on a card or letter she wrote me, on most of the recipes in my recipe box.

The other day I was walking by a framed picture of her and my father, one that I love, where they are riding in a boat on Lake Travis, and they’re both windblown, tanned and happy in the retirement years, looking straight ahead, Mom in big sunglasses. And for a second as I walked by, the photo in my peripheral vision, it wasn’t a picture of Mom I saw, it was her. She came to life. I stopped, went back, looked again. But it was back to being just a photo.

Is there a connection between repressed memories in early life and later dementia? Can compartmentalizing a painful memory in the brain, closing it off in its own private room, leave the brain in its old age, unable to make certain necessary connections? Like a street you must travel to get somewhere, but that street is just CLOSED. Has been closed for a long time. Can sequestering traumatic memories lead to a later-life brain that has too many roadblocks? No through traffic.

Recently, I found out from my brother’s wife Pam that my mom had told her something I’d never heard. That after my mom got pregnant, married, left home and had kids of her own, when she would visit her parents in Ohio, the incest continued. I am newly appalled and disgusted.

So when the dutiful daughter took the train to visit them, with Linda, Laurel and Larry in tow,  even then she faced sexual abuse at the hands of her father. A blind eye from her mother. The same mother who could not forgive her for disgracing the family name.

I’ll tell you what’s a disgrace: her parents; the hand she was dealt.

In the last year of her life, my mom obsessed about Bob Hope. He had died in 2003 at the age of 100. She thought about him every day and would ask me if I remembered that she’d had lunch with him.

“Yes,” I said. “Back in your Apple Blossom Princess days.”

One day when we were talking about this, a young woman on staff came in my mother’s room to return her clean laundry. 

“I bet she doesn’t know,” my mother said, and the woman looked at me and said “What?” “She wonders if you know that she was an Apple Blossom Princess,” I said. “And she had lunch with Bob Hope.”

A plastic bin under her bed held all her letters and photos and keepsakes. I pulled the scrapbook out of the bin and opened it up to one page, then another, showing the woman my mom’s glamour shot from the newspaper, my mom at a luncheon with Bob Hope, my mom atop the float made of real flowers.

“That’s you?” she asked my mother. “You’re beautiful!”

A few years ago, in the fall, I went to my friend Deb’s Montana cabin to write. Two days in, it snowed hard and deep. I woke to a beautiful, pristine, crystalline world. As the sun came out and the day warmed, snow started to shift. First, a long slow slide off one corner of the roof. Then, the pine branches—snowy forms the shape of Finland and Sweden—surrendered to gravity. The entire south-facing slope of the pitched roof went all at once, like a long roll of thunder, like an avalanche. Each pine bough, before letting go, was so heavy, so downward bent. When the release came, when gravity won, the branch bounced with levity back to its unencumbered weight.

The trees’ instructions are innate.

We humans hold so much before we let go.

Some mounds of snow have farther to fall, to the sloping valley floor, gaining speed while losing shape, dismantling on their way to becoming water.

***

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