I think of mom often.
Like when I read anything by Jack London
or Ernest Thompson Seton.
Her memory swirls around me when I see a dead opossum by the roadside
it reminds me of the one we had as kids.
Yes, we had an opossum.
It wasn't a pet as much as it was a wounded soldier,
convalescing in a field hospital close to the front and cared for by Florence Nightingale,
except the field hospital was our carport under a suspended Old Towne wood canoe,
the battle, with a Ford or Chevrolet, on the main road near our house in Connecticut.
Florence was Mom.
She peeks at me around corners in the kitchen when I make fish,
or soup,
because I hated fish as a child.
She made us eat it because it was healthy and the blocks of frozen Turbot were cheap
and she was a single mom at forty two with three hungry mouths to feed.
She tried to make me think it was exotic because it came from Iceland.
I thought Turbot was Icelandic for "more bones in your mouth than you ever thought possible".
Mom was, however, an accomplished homemade souper.
She's by my side as I explain wild things
to other little wild things which hang on my every word.
Words put into my head which make it seem,
to the under four foot set,
that I know everything.
Knowledge put there by her in our yard,
by the lakes of New York, the mountains of West Virginia or deserts of California.
She is in every frog that jumps, whippoorwill that calls or each stalk of Jewel Weed,
which is a cure for poison ivy by the way,
that grows near a stream in the woods.
But then today
as my daughter opened the overhead sunglass holder in her car for the first time,
the Subaru she inherited from Mom over a year ago,
and Grandma's sunglasses fell out,
there were no thoughts of lessons learned
or knowledge imparted.
Today,
I just thought of her.