Remembrances of a Mother by George Merrill

I think of my mother on Mother’s Day although differently than I did when she was alive.

In my mid-life, long after she was gone, I began having thoughts of my mother, mostly little things about her. It’s in the little things where time stores the memories of our loved ones.

I recall how she smelled; the scent of a woman mixed with Apple Blossom perfume and cigarette smoke. Not an endearing image for others, perhaps, but for me, I cannot pass a woman that smokes and not have affectionate images of my mother waft through my mind.

I grew up in the late 1930’s and 40’s. Then childhood ills were treated primitively and only crises sent folks to doctors.

It was the era of castor oil, cod liver oil, and mustard plasters, iodine for cuts and scrapes and Argyrol for sinus infections and sore throats. Enemas were popular for treating most GI disturbances except diarrhea.

Sickness kept me from school although its costs sometimes outweighed benefits when my mother might administer frightening treatments. During mumps, she slathered a greasy salve on my swollen glands. It was black, smelled like insecticide with the consistency of axel grease. I felt like an ailing crankshaft.

However, my mother read me books when I was sick. I liked that. That’s when I first realized I loved hearing and telling stories. Once when I had measles and was in bed, I cried when she read me, “The Yearling.” I still hear her voice when, as a very small child, she read me an English nursery rhyme called, “A Frog He Would a ‘Wooing Go.” The tale bobs along musically with nonsense words: “With a rowley, powley, gammon and spinach,

Heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley”

Before I was ever able to articulate it, I knew that she was having fun reading it. I didn’t know what ‘gammon and spinach’ were. It didn’t matter. It was enough to experience the intimacy, intimacy that’s always there, even in conflict, between a child and its mother.

Mother’s explanation for medical treatments was formulaic. Why did I have to take castor oil, or be slathered with salve, be covered with a mustard plaster? She would only reply “it’s good for what ails you.”

Her remedies were therapeutically doubtful. But the confidence she exuded announcing, “it’s good for what ails you” made me feel safe. Predictability and confidence are comforting during illness. Little things like nonsense words often communicate the sense of an abiding presence, like tree frogs we hear at night but never see.

My mother was a skillful cook. She liked making soups, all kinds: broccoli, spinach, Manhattan clam chowder, tomato and potato soup – not vichyssoise just potato soup – my mother was not pretentious. My wife once asked her how she made broccoli soup. “Oh, a little bit of seasoning, you know, some butter, a dash of cream” and on she’d go. She was fudging, guarding her recipe, I thought. I don’t think so now. I understand now what mothers do; they wing it. Mothers are, above all, intuitive. Maybe they can’t articulate their methods but for most challenges they find successful solutions without having any idea how they did it. No culinary school, diagnostic manuals or psychology books are required: for many moms, it’s all about flying by the seat of their skirts (few women wore pants in those days.)

Families mediate our sense of place. My mother and father came from old Staten Island families. When I was a boy the Island was rural, like the Shore. I’m fond of the Eastern Shore because the Island’s tidewater marshes, creeks and open spaces were then similar to where I live today.

After I left, I’d return home to visit. On one visit we went together to Fort Wadsworth to shop. At the time she knew she had cancer and limited time. The historic fort is a beautiful promontory that overlooks the Narrows. I watched as she looked over to Brooklyn. It was a lovely day, windy, with whipped cream clouds and blue sky. As she faced into the wind, it blew through her hair and she looked happy and at home. I was happy to be there, at home. In June of 1964, she died and that November the Verrazano Bridge was completed and open to traffic. Within two years the Island was savaged by overdevelopment, and my mother died because of cells that ran amok because they too, like overdevelopment, couldn’t regulate their growth.

But I don’t want to leave my reflections on Mother’s Day with only thoughts of sadness. She died a “good death” meaning that she died safely with my sister’s care at her home and my brother and I living close enough to visit regularly. I had long talks with her or just sat silently with her as she dozed. She suffered minimal pain.

And as mother’s can do, she managed the tasks of her dying with grace, just as she had managed her life, a dash of this, some of that, a few nonsense words, flying by the seat of her skirt and intuitively saying the things that would help us let her go and to heal gently from the loss she knew we’d soon feel.