My magnolia was in full glory on Mother’s Day. The cold spring had kept her flowers only half-open for a week, but Sunday’s onset of summer warmth let her burst forth fully. Glory hallelujah.
I camped under her canopy and drank in the intoxicating fragrance. Then I thought of a day several years ago when I was up in the magnolia doing a spring pruning. I wasn’t sure which branches to lop and which to save. I called Dad from right there in the tree but got Mom instead. Not surprisingly, she proceeded to tell me exactly how to do it, at length.
“Your dad is too soft,” she said, in a familiar vein. “You need to cut off any branch that’s touching another branch. That’s how you help it grow.”
This was typically tough talk from Mom, who came from the Miner clan on Detroit’s northwest side. The Miners were not pansies. Mom loved flowers but she was not going to be soft on the magnolia.
I was happy to have these thoughts of Mom on Mother’s Day, as I no longer had Mom herself. Since her passing in 2011 life has been a little shallower. It never again will include me walking into the living room of the homestead in Williamston, and Mom greeting me from her corner chair with a beaming smile and soft kiss, her hands gently framing my face.
I will never see another smile quite that joyful. Mom always called us kids “the jewels in our crown.” She did have a way of making us feel like royalty.
Sunday was a festive day on Facebook as friends shared photos and memories of their mothers. It was heart-warming to see all these lovely women, often with their children but sometimes solo photos of themselves as ravishing young adults. It was easy to see why their children shared the pictures so glowing with love and beauty.
For some though the beauty was tinged with sadness, a celebration of a life that was but is no longer except in spirit. For one dear friend in particular, there was as much sorrow as sweetness in sharing photos of her mother who had died just a week before. For those of us in the orphanage, seeing families gather for lunch on the patio in their Sunday best is wistful at best.
The traditional tune “Motherless Children” states it a little too baldly: “Motherless children have a hard time when mother is dead, Lord. /Nobody treats you like a mother will …” It’s been recorded by many from the Rev. Gary Davis and Bob Dylan to Eric Clapton and Lucinda Williams. The version I know is by Steve Miller, who softens the lyric to “when their mother is gone.” His dirge-like guitars and soulful vocal plaintively express the loss: “all that weeping, all that crying.”
My Andrea will cry at unexpected times about her mother, who died 11 years ago. A friend told me the other day that she had broken into tears that morning for her mother, who has been gone for 30.
The photo I posted of Mom on Facebook was from Rice’s Resort, a little patch of Eden on Lake Skegemog (then called Round Lake) where we spent many summers in the 1950s. Mom is sitting on a stump, chin perched on hand, smiling softly. She could be looking at us kids playing or just thinking about how happy she feels to be there. Her face says all is well with the world.
That is the Mom I think about on Mother’s Day, brimming with life, pregnant with joy. She still talks to me up in the magnolia, and her fresh beauty blooms in the sun.