Published: March 24, 2008 10:38 pm            

Cathie Shaffer: Wishing for the impossible

My mother came down to visit last week, and in the process of a chat over dinner, she posed one of those questions grown children hate to hear.

About to revisit her will, she asked what specific items of hers I’d like.

She’d make sure they were included as behasts, she said, so there would be no confusion after she was gone.

That’s a difficult question to answer. First of all, I prefer not to think of my mother passing on. I like to think of her as being as perpetual as time, ever a constant in my life.

Secondly, I suspect the things that most strongly connect me to my mother no longer exist.

I’d love to have the century plant that grew in the side yard of my childhood home, which supposedly blooms only once every 100 years. The summer it budded, my mother threatened us girls with a near-death experience if we even breathed on the expected flower.

Not yet big enough to attend school but old enough to understand a dire threat, I wandered out, picked the flower — and wasn’t spoken to by my mother for a good week, or so holds family lore.

There are a few other things I’d love to have, too.

I’d like the first rock I picked up during my mother’s rockhound days, the one she tumbled for me until it was smooth and shiny.

I’d like the piece of paper, long lost to the burn barrel, on which she taught me to draw a simple tree, still the extent of my artistic ability.

I’d like a photo that was never taken of my mother running with us girls from a black bear in Canada, a highlight of an otherwise uneventful trip.

I’d like the secret to her candied yams. I have the recipe, I’ve written down her instructions, yet I’ve never gotten the same combination of sweet and crusty that she manages.

I’d like to forever have the security of waking sick in the night and calling my mother’s name in the darkness, knowing that she’d hurry to my bedroom to touch my forehead and soothe my fears.

Even now, when I catch the scent of ginger ale, it makes me remember the gentleness of my mother’s voice as she handed me a glass of it and said, “If you can drink this, it will settle your stomach.” I’ll never know whether it was really the ginger ale that produced the desired results or the confidence with which she presented it, but it always helped.

In my inheritance, I’d like to have forever the way her eyes teared up right as I walked down the aisle to meet my future husband, and the tenderness with which she held my newborn babies.

I’d like the snowballs she still tosses when she thinks we’re not looking, the laughter when her dog or mine does something silly, the passion with she tackles every new project.

Sitting across from me, my mother waited patiently for my answer. Finally, I suggested that she leave me her crackle glass collection and the antique pump organ that no one ever plays but me.

She nodded and the subject changed. But in that second between one conversation and the next, I felt a subtle vibe that makes me wonder if she already knows what I’d really like and wishes there was some way to leave me all those things.

CATHIE SHAFFER can be reached at cshaffer@dailyindependent.com or (606) 473-9851.

        

• Click to discuss this story with other readers on our forums.