Undertakings

Jinx and I were up before the sun lifted above the fog, and the air was as cool as an August morning’s can be, full of mist and memories and murmurs, and we set out for our stroll. On the way back, the sun pierced the fog and clattered down upon us in arrows and spears, and the birds sensed the change and their cries grew more boisterous and they began to swoop from tree to fence to building to post to rock. The gravel crunched beneath my shoes and a chipmunk scampered across my path, his tail held straight up. Jinx was looking in the other direction and I smiled at the secret shared between the little vanished creature and me. When we reached home, the spotted dog took a rest in the young sunlight.

My wife is currently reading a blog written by a woman who was raised Amish but left that community. Mrs. Orr laughs at the woman’s use of the word “pie” in the plural. As in “This recipe will make enough crusts for three or four pie.” According to my wife, she has searched and searched but failed to find a single instance where the woman uses the plural “pies” in her cuisineversations. This reminds me of a habit of my mother’s. She would refer to cheese in the plural, as in “Those cheese are good, but they’re not as good as the old hoop cheese we used to get at the market in Perryville.” She also referred to molasses and sauerkraut in the plural. Those molasses. Those kraut. And license, for some maddening reason. “If you’re looking for your fishing license, you left them on the kitchen table.”

Mother. How odd it is to think that this coming week will mark one century since she was born into this world. And how perplexing to realize that in just a few weeks, it will be six years since she departed this life. How did that happen? I think to myself. How did six entire years roll past me, and what has really happened to me since then? Could it be that that singular day, the day I got the call from my sister and realized that I would never talk to Mother again, never hear her voice in this life again — could it be that that day shook something loose in me? Could that be why I have so often felt upended in my faith and hampered in my ability to think clearly about ultimate things, realities, destinies, griefs, paths, blessings, opinions, fears, sufferings?

I have for some time been writing, with tentative hand, the outline of a memoir about my relationship with my mother, that slender, fierce little woman who sacrificed all her dreams and energies in order to love and raise my sister and me, and did it all alone. The pencil strokes fill one of my notebooks, but the task has been languishing for a few months.

And it occurred to me recently that perhaps, just perhaps, this blog would be a useful forum in which to write the memoir. Not devoting the blog exclusively to the memoir, mind you, but regularly posting installments of my reflections as they come to me in the daily arc of hours of meditation and scribbling. Useful because it would give me a focus, even a sort of “deadline” to this most personal of projects.

And so I have decided to proceed with this intimate undertaking, to put out there in the public view a portrait of a woman whom I loved so much, and whose life was so heroic and so tragic and so mysterious, a life I am convinced I cannot allow to be melted in time like the fog that shrouds this little farm in the August mornings. Mother mattered, and her life mattered, and I will try to tell the story of what I knew of her and the things behind those sad blue eyes.

I hope y’all will stop by and read, and I hope you will remember that what I am about to undertake is fragile and precious and ultimately impossible. So here I go.

~ S.K. Orr