Plague Journal, Mother’s Day
It is raining outside. Rain is a long awaited gift. My mother would have rejoiced at a gentle rain falling to a dry ground. Springtime is a rainy season in normal times. These are not normal times. Global warming is another way of saying that weather patterns are disrupted, intensified, too much rain, wind, even tornadoes or not enough. Mom understood what that means because she grew up on a small farm in rural North Carolina. She would have seen my grandfather pray for rain on more than one dry occasion. Rain to save fields of wilting corn. What to do when drought comes? Pray.
On another positive note, debris from the Chinese, Long March 5B rocket booster fell into the Indian Ocean near the Maldives. Nothing from the sky last night in Batavia. In my mother’s time no one worried about 23 tons of space junk falling from the sky.
My mother knew difficult choices in her life time. She was married at 18, and soon after lost her first husband to an automobile accident. The accident also took her only brother, a passenger in the ill fated vehicle. The accident was no one’s fault, a blown tire, as she told the story. Due to the grief that enveloped her family and the entire small rural community she made the difficult but necessary decision to immigrate to Durham to start over. That’s where I was born and grew up.
Mom knew how to find the “middle way,” making the responsible choice in a bad situation. She did that over and over in her life. She understood survival in extenuating circumstances. In retrospect I have been inclined to follow her in this practice. That has been my bias. Play the hand that life deals out… Find as much happiness, a measure of satisfaction as you can under the circumstances. I do not remember when I learned the lesson. I learned involuntarily due to her influence.
The morning is quiet now, soon to awake with sounds of my grand daughter Finlea greeting the day with exclamation, sounds of delight. There’s reading to look forward to. I have an obit of Jim Steinman to read. The great composer passed just this April. Additionally perhaps I will finish a book by Michael Polanyi describing the process of learning, as well as the concatenated structure of being. Mom would have just smiled at that book.
I also anticipate the high point of this day. A card of appreciation and a small gift will be presented to my wife, to our daughter and daughter in law: a memento saying “thank you” for their grasp of the work of motherhood.
