(*Note: This is dedicated to all mothers, and especially my mother. She is also a writer and lives in the same city I do, so we attended the session together. Of course, I read it to her.)
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Perhaps I would go back to an early memory of walking
to preschool at St. Pat’s Catholic Church, three blocks from our house,
hand-in-hand with my mother. My, my, I must have been young. Four years old, I
think? It’s a very simple memory, almost like a dream…
At the dead-end of the street at
the edge of our neighborhood in Wisconsin, a stand of carefully planted pine
trees stood tall, already old, forming a wall of protection between that quaint,
safe neighborhood and the business part of town. Just on the other side was the
Catholic church, joining that protective force, standing on its own, apart from
the cluster of churches on the opposite side of town. Just the church and the
pine trees. We weren’t Catholic, but it was a happy place to attend preschool, which
I remember fairly well.
But the walks… Mornings of pine-scented quiet,
so close to home we just walked each day, but me still too young to go by
myself… and we didn’t have to hold hands, but we did. (Is it one memory or a
composite of several ones?) I liked that there wasn’t a sidewalk at the dead-end.
We just stepped over the curb and onto the dirt deer path the last twenty feet
to the parking lot. The empty lot led to the back door of the church where my
classroom was.
I’ve always liked trees… and maybe
those trees started it all. They probably seemed even taller to my young eyes.
They were majestic and special, like Heidi’s, the Swiss girl of literature, the
swishing of the needle-laden branches in the breeze a very nostalgic sound. Those
who grew up near the coast may fondly remember the pleasant white noise of the
ocean, but I, a Midwest girl through-and-through, remember the pines.
Maybe I would go back to this
memory just to squeeze my mother’s hand again, look up and say, “Thank you for
this walk. Thank you for your part in my love of trees, morning walks and quiet
neighborhoods.” Perhaps I’m choosing this moment in my life because it was an
end of an era of me living at home, leaving my special last-kid-at-home
relationship with Mom. It was just before my entrance into a much longer era of
fulltime school attendance. But, perhaps surprisingly, given the era’s classic sentimentality,
my memory is not ever of her crying, not of holding me back tightly from more
hours away from home and from growing up, but rather of quietly holding my hand…
taking me there.
Selah.
