Mom
"If it were a snake, it would've bit you." One of her favorite expressions. Comes in handy with kids.
My mom loved company.
I can’t tell you how many times she’d tell us “we’re having company over” on such and such date. Does anyone use the word ‘company’ with that particular meaning any more? It seems so…patrician. Even though my mom was anything but patrician.
She loved noise. When there weren’t kids using her sofas, dining table, living room or lawns as a makeshift community center, she kept the television or radio on and audible. She lived for the commotion of life being lived and she’d put up with all kinds of shenanigans. She rarely, if ever, lost her temper over my errant tennis balls smacking loudly against the front door as I reenacted the World Series while playing pitch and catch with the front porch steps.
She loved activity. The comings and goings, the touch football games in the front yard, the boxing or putting matches in the back yard and the endless card games being played on the ‘card table’. You know, those quick fold up tables used for the younger crowd during holiday feasts. We owned—at minimum—two of them. A minister’s wife could not afford to be without a set of them.
The dining table was one of her nicest pieces of furniture but it was also the perfect venue for a rowdy game of “Spoons” because of its ample expanse, or the “football” game with a tightly folded paper triangle because of its delicately routed border positioned near the edge—as if the woodworker designed it with an end zone in mind.
Mom’s casa was su casa and none of my friends were hesitant to plop down on the couches or take a glance at what might be in the refrigerator or cupboards. She was welcoming seven days a week and, if she ever got tired of it (and I’m sure that she did), she never let on.
She loved people. She loved chaperoning church ladies to the Mexican border for a shopping spree or taking them to the “big city” for cultural activities or surprising my urbane sister with a—what they would call today a—“pop up” tour of a real River Oaks mansion. “Surprising” being the operative word in my previous sentence. Mom operated under the assumption everyone was as comfortable with company as she was.
She loved Church’s fried chicken and the buffet at Luby’s cafeteria, especially once she tired of cooking. To this day I find nothing degrading about dragging a tray on a stainless steel railing, my weight shifting from one leg to the other, as I try to decide whether I want one steaming dish or another while simultaneously ignoring the side eye, along with the heavy sighs, from the other hungry customer, or customers, behind me.
My mom had four kids and fostered three others. Her kids came in waves—almost every one of us five years apart. This means she was fooling with diapers, and fooling with non-verbal humans, for a much longer period than most mothers. Which means her heroism went unnoticed.
When the last one of us went off to college, my parents left the cosmopolitan, redneck schizophrenic environs of Dallas and embarked for small town island life on the north end of Padre Island a few hundred yards off the coast of Texas. That’s where I learned my mom loved beach combing. Sand dollars, sea shells, sea glass and interesting pieces of Gulf of Mexico flotsam and jetsam. She loved the steady inland breezes, the freedom of the open beach and having a place she could smoke without raising the ire or condemnation of my father.
That’s when I learned she loved Boston Terriers.
I don’t know why she loved Boston Terriers though I had heard talk of a previous pet named Boots that may have been a Boston Terrier. Or maybe I imagined that. My siblings will let me know. I assumed she liked them because the silhouette on RCA Victrola records resembled a Boston Terrier. I assumed this because I remember thumbing through stacks of 78rpm Victrola records, thick as trivets, boxed up in our garage. They were today’s equivalent of CDs or DVDs.
Her move to Port Aransas, Texas, was when I learned how much she loved hummingbirds.
And that’s how I got to thinking about my mom today. It’s freezing in Seattle. There’s several inches of snow on the ground. It doesn’t appear to be going anywhere soon. At night the temperatures are dipping close to the teens.
Hummingbird feeders are merely vessels for sugar water. They freeze. I don’t know why all hummingbirds don’t migrate to warmer climes but it’s safe to say—without a lot of plants in bloom midwinter—they’re counting on sugar water to be available. I take a glance out the kitchen window every now and then to see if the sugar water in our hummingbird feeder remains in liquid form. Occasionally I catch a hummingbird feeding to its oversized heart’s content.
My mom became an armchair birder during her time walking the parking lot flat, hard-packed beaches of north Padre Island. Seagulls, pelicans, cormorants, cranes, sandpipers—all drew her attention. But she loved the flitting, frenetic and colorful hummingbirds—only feet away outside her thirty by fifteen screened-in second floor living room-porch—the most. The hummingbirds must have loved the wall of oleanders on two sides of the house and whatever other tropical bloomers that grew naturally on the Texas Gulf Coast.
Mom would frequently refer to the glossy, coffee table book on hummingbirds in an effort to identify the latest species that had caught her eye. After a while, she merely referenced it just to be able to hold the vision of the hummingbird she had seen in her mind. She knew it was a Rufous, or an Anna’s, or Ruby Throated, or Violet Crowned.
Not long after my mother passed away, I was on a river trip in southeastern Utah. The strangest thing happened one day while we were standing about at lunch telling “no, shit, there I was stories”. This is the timeless magnificence of river trips. You get to while away magnificent, or not-so-good, days with nothing better to do than messing about in boats. Or around boats. Or in the general vicinity of boats.
A hummingbird—and I couldn’t tell you the species—landed on my sunglasses a whisper away from my right eye…and sat there. I’m not sure I even realized it was there until my fellow river runner, Sharon, excitedly brought it to my attention. We were both astounded and bemused and spoke in our best library hush voices. After a prolonged respite on my glasses, it buzzed over to my topless companion and perched on her breast.
I’d never seen a hummingbird not in motion. It goes without saying I’d never seen a hummingbird casually resting on a nipple.
I don’t recall precisely the amount of time it hung around on Sharon’s chest but I do remember it was far longer than you would ever expect a wild hummingbird to remain in human company.
As my mom, who thoroughly enjoyed using colorful colloquialisms, might have remarked, I could have been knocked over with a feather.
A hummingbird feather, in this case.
A brief hummingbird video seems appropriate.
Also, a rescue dog named Shelby.
Bonus hummingbird stuff.
In addition—a view from Padre Island:
Love this piece :-) Thank you for keeping an eye on our hummingbird feeder :-) Would have loved to have met your mother. Her open door policy reminds me of someone else I know :-)
Beautiful memories. FYI, Boots was a spaniel ( not Cocker, but Springer or a mixture of the two, bred by Grumpy and given by him to us kids. He didn’t get to make the move to Texas with us and I don’t know why as I was a self absorbed teenager and now I am ashamed.