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Mother
was a Southern beauty, auburn hair, large, Scarlett O’Hara hazel
eyes, and creamy ivory skin. She would not dream of going into the yard
without her large natural-colored straw hat. At Cherry Grove beach, where
my family spent the month of August, she went swimming or walked on the
beach only from 7 until 9 in the morning and after 4. And she swore by
Pond’s cold cream. Dipping her hand into a jar of cold cream every
night, she smoothed a glob of it across her neck and throat and gently
spread it with her fingertips over her face, using an upward movement
as she explained, not to stretch the skin or create wrinkles.
Mother had her hair done every week, but she gave herself a manicure, performing that ritual, for that was what it was, at least once and sometimes twice a week. From the white enamel drawer in the kitchen, she got out old newspaper and spread it on the kitchen table. Pulling cotton from one long continuous roll wrapped in blue paper, she slowly removed the old polish from each nail. Then she dipped an orange stick into a bottle of cuticle remover and gently pushed back every cuticle. Next came the first coat of bright red polish. It was always Love That Red by Revlon. No matter how tight the budget was after Daddy lost his business, she eked out enough from her grocery allowance to splurge on Love That Red. After the polished dried, Mother rolled up the newspaper and wiped that table clean. When we moved into our house, she had that table covered with the same linoleum that was on the kitchen floor. That way we never had to use a cloth or place mats, and cleaning the table took just seconds. Mother said that when she died she did not want people to stand around and say, “Oh, Jane was such a good housekeeper!” She wanted things clean enough, but life was too exciting – too many people to meet and enjoy, too many good books to be read – to waste days just cleaning. As a little girl, Mother was plagued with earaches and when she was eight – before the discovery of ether – she had a mastoidectomy without being put to sleep. Because she was sick so much, she developed a life long love of reading which made her a great romantic. When she was nine and read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, she was so impressed that she persuaded her younger brother Harry and her best friend Rema to reenact the book. Harry and Mother stuffed Rema into the parlor grand piano box that was stored out by the garage, and then they skipped in to eat supper. When Rema’s mother phoned and my grandmother said, “Jane, have you seen Rema?” angelically she folded her hands in her lap and replied, “I haven’t seen her in a while,” while she slipped biscuits and ham into her napkin to feed the victim. Mother was thrilled with this game and would have kept it up at least through the night, but the prisoner got cold and scared and cried until Mother released her. As an adult, Mother woke up every day with a sense of excitement and anticipation, feeling that each new day was a present she had been given to share. It never seemed to matter that life was really not exciting; there was little money, few trips, very few luxuries. And Daddy worked long hours and many different jobs to try to recover from his business losses. She was a bright and intelligent woman – interested in everything – who put herself through two years of college by writing for the local newspaper. She probably would have kept on working except that she was a wife in the South in the fifties when women were expected to stay home, run their households, and care for their children. To the horror and irritation of our family, she was an early riser and a morning person. Early one spring morning she tiptoed into my room, gently shaking me, “Get up, the back yard is full of starlings.” “Oh, no!” I moaned. “I’ll hold you up if you’ll just look at them.” I knew it was useless. I stood up and rubbed my eyes. I could see no grass, only black starlings everywhere. But it was still too early for me; I flopped back on the bed as she left the room singing softly, “for the beauty of the skies.” We belonged to Trinity Methodist Church, and we never missed a Sunday. Mother and Daddy had moved their membership from the large downtown church when gas was rationed during World War II. As she entered the church one Sunday, Mother raised her fingers in a V for a victory sign to a friend who had just been promoted at the bank. In between them was an old man who smiled and waved, just knowing that Mother was speaking to him. After church Mother hurried over to apologize and explain to this older gentleman. He was ninety years old and very deaf and never understood, but Mr. Stroud and Mother became great friends, and we picked him up for church almost every Sunday after that. When he slid into the pew next to Mother, he immediately marked the songs we were to sing in the hymnal. Mother loved to sing. She had a marvelous fantasy that someday she would be standing on stage and open her mouth and the most exquisite sound would burst forth, astounding her audience. The truth was that the dogs in the neighborhood howled when Mother sang. She did love to try, though, and she and Mr. Stroud would rise at the first note and lustily break into song. Mr. Stroud’s sight was not much better than his hearing; however, so Mother and Mr. Stroud either pealed out “Rock of Ages” as the congregation sang “Amazing Grace” or sang five notes behind everyone else in the congregation. We begged Mother to do something, but she said, “I will not deny him one of the few pleasures he has left in the world.” Mother and Mr. Stroud continued their duet until he died. Mother had something we never could define or name: strangers talked to her, confided in her, in the grocery store, at the dry cleaners, wherever she was. There was an undefinable quality, an openness, a warmth that oozed from her. She listened, totally concentrating when someone talked to her. When she responded, she shared herself and stories of her life that somehow were comforting and reassuring. She talked so much with a deep, rich voice which mesmerized her audience that I felt people forgot their troubles by getting caught up in what tale she was telling. Our house was often full of lonely people just looking for someone who cared. She met people everywhere and once while riding the bus to visit her parents for the weekend, she sat next to a minister who confessed to her that he was on his way to kill his wife. Mother listened, then talked; and somehow by the time they had arrived, she had helped him change his mind. Later in her life, when she was only 59, she was diagnosed as atypical Parkinson’s disease. Unable to walk alone or dress herself or care for herself in any way, she was forced to enter a nursing home. It was a bitterly cold, windy January afternoon, when I wheeled her up the ramp to the front door. She stopped me and said, “Help me up. I want to hold on to you and try to walk in.” At the front door she paused once again and said, “Well, it is going to be like going to Maine Chance (a noted health spa during the fifties). I will leave here thinner and in the best shape I have ever been in.” My sister and I had decorated her room to look as much like home as we could make it. The big green fern hung in the window, and on the wall was a picture of us taken when we were three and six. Her favorite blue chair was opposite the big color t.v. All the residents who could walk found their way into Mother’s room. Many of them had no idea where they were; they just knew that there they were loved and listened to. Florence wandered over every day with her 50 year old retarded daughter Willie Pearl, and Mother sat patiently while she named on each finger, “Morton, Thomas, Rolinda, Junior, Flossie, Willie Pearl,” became frustrated and started the list over again, trying to remember the names of her nine children. Alma entertained her with tales of her daring escapades from World War II. Before being rescued by a helicopter and operating on President Carter’s goiter, she said she spent the night , “jumping from one foxhole to two foxhole to three foxhole.” Mother commended her for heroic actions. There was a beauty parlor at the nursing home, and Mother continued to have her hair done and to paint her nails with Love That Red as long as she could. Florence and Alma and even Willie Pearl insisted on having their hair done, too. They stood at the door of her small room and moved their mouths as Mother’s trembling hands tried to paint each nail. Willie Pearl ran to the administrator’s office and held out her hands. As the illness progressed, Mother had to have a tracheotomy which meant that she had to move to a skilled care facility. By this time she was so weak that she did not have enough strength to lift her finger to cover the trach to speak. Now that she was unable to talk, we were frightened over taking her to a strange place where people who did not know her would be responsible for her care. We sold her short. She communicated with her eyes that she appreciated bring turned in bed or having a nurse apply the cold cream to her face at night. Somehow patients continued to be drawn to her room, and I would often find some lost soul just standing by her bed. Gradually, she grew weaker and weaker. She slipped into light coma. On the last day of her life, I stepped into her room about three-thirty. With tears rolling down her cheeks one of the nurses was seated by her bed with Mother’s hand in hers, slowing stroking Love that Red on each nail. She turned to me and said, “I may get fired. I am supposed to be meeting with the administrator. But I knew it would be important to your Mother to have her nails done.” Jennie Ariail Center for Academic Excellence
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