By Joan Colburn Robertson

I can still hear the laughter floating up to my bedroom from the living room where my parents and their friends are playing bridge.  Mom has spent her day preparing a mouth-watering meal for their evening guests and topped it off with a beautiful pie, for which she is well-known—maybe apple crumb or rhubarb meringue.

This is the same woman who bore twins when her first child was 2-1/2 years old (each twin over 6 pounds when she was a mere 100 to begin with), had to care for them all when Dad had polio in the early 40s, and then had another baby when we were all in high school.  

Mom was the homemaker who preserved applesauce with cinnamon and sometimes red-hot hearts, peaches, and currant jelly and froze her home-grown green beans and corn off the cob.  She was the mother who sewed clothing for her children (and their dolls) and taught them how to sew for themselves, who drove them to violin and cello lessons when we lived out on the farm and rounded out our trio by playing the piano herself, who helped out with Girl Scout and 4-H projects, and who grew a fabulous hollyhock two stories high and coaxed a purple clematis to cover a trellis each year.  She made sure we made it to Sunday school every week and was a member of a ladies circle at church.

Mom made sure Dad had a quiet cocktail time and dinner alone with her when he got home from work in the evening and gladly accompanied him, always smiling even though she was basically shy, to his yearly professional meetings out of town.  What an active and lively life she led!

Now I am with her, but she no longer knows who I am—just another nice person who has come to visit her.  She sings along with a guitar player in the activity room and giggles when a dog is brought to her to pet.  She laughs as she recites, “One, two, buckle my shoe….”  She is delighted when we have hot chocolate at lunch and toasts a gentleman who is trying to sing.  I feed her ice cream, and she tells me how much she loves chocolate.

Then she looks sad.  I lean close to hear her better.  “I miss my mother,” she says.  As we touch foreheads I reply, “I miss my mother too.”