Her Story

What I wish most today, on the anniversary of her passing forty-seven years ago, is to remember a lot more about my mother. 

I've got fragments. She collected salt and pepper shakers. She enjoyed it when I would sing Honey Don't for her. She laughed easily and loved doing so. But I don't remember her favorite movie star, singer, author, or food. I don't recall how she reacted to Kennedy's assassination, Watergate, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.  

I remember she taught me the cha-cha. I remember her terse advice about public speaking: Stand up to be seen, speak up to be heard, sit down to be appreciated. I remember she volunteered to be the parent chaperone on nearly every school trip. But her speaking voice and the smell of her perfume left me long ago. I want to clearly recall both. 

I still own an end table with a marble top she gave me when I moved into my first apartment. I also have a three sentence note of appreciation I wrote her for Mother's Day in 1957, in cursive. And a picture of the two of us taken at my youngest sister's wedding in 1970 regularly rotates among the photos in the Aura frame sitting in my kitchen. Today, I want more than these few reminders of her. 

I want to remember every song she sang when my dad accompanied her on the ukelele, every joke she enjoyed telling, every story she told me about growing up, her marriage to my father, being a mother to four children born in forty-nine months. I want to remember every part of her story.