Beginning

[Draft #10 so far]

For as long as I could remember, Mother has been medicated. She was medicated prior to and during her pregnancy. She'd been through a series of medications, and each one brought personality changes that sometimes made the underlying illness seem like it'd be more acceptable than the person she became.

The first drug turned her into a eunuch. Though the medication probably helped at the start, it made the relationship between her and her husband difficult, therefore prompting her to try something else.

The next one zombified her. She wasn't awake most of the time. It made our bedtime routine difficult, for she would fall asleep while I read to her. I loved reading, and would continue until her husband came to take her to their bedroom down the hall. He would say goodnight before closing the door behind him, with her cradled in his arms.

At the time, we lived in a two-story farmhouse. The kitchen and bath were located at the rear of the “shotgun” house.  An added screened-in porch next to the kitchen contained canning supplies on waxed wooden shelves. We canned tomatoes, mostly, but also other vegetation as they came in: okra, green and wax beans, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries. I remember being sent into the shrubs to pick berries, for I was small enough to fit underneath. I could pick without becoming covered in tiny and not-so-tiny scratches from the thorny branches. Mother would make jelly. She didn't like seeds, so she always made jelly. I remember the colours on the cheesecloth as she strained the different berries. In the Autumn, her fingertips were often pinkish-purple.

My stepfather was a garlic aficionado, so we had a significant garlic patch, something like three rows of about thirty feet each. Nearly a hundred lineal feet of garlic! A clove was planted every four inches. That's a lot of garlic. I was not a garlic lover. I learned to tolerate garlic. We grew cabbages, broccoli, white potatoes and orange yams, red beets, kale (before it became fashionable), okra, and, oh, did I mention garlic?

In the wintertime, the canning process moved on to meat, for we did not have a separate freezer to help preserve game. Venison was packed into quart-sized Ball jars, the lids held on with rings, and then the jars were canned, both cooking the meat and sealing the jar. Sometimes Mother would feel creative an insert something with the meat to flavour it: whole cloves of garlic much of the time, but also thyme, oregano, rosemary. When canned, the venison becomes the texture of well-done roast beef. We were kind of a meat-and-potatoes family, eating a lot of dishes learned from Grandmother, which she, in turn, learned during her school days before she met Granddad in college. Though the food was of a different nature, and, some would say quality, from what Mother had grown up with, she learned the new cuisine well enough to create her own version of it, often with improvements to taste, texture, and appearance. Improvising, she added touches of more pungent flavour to the bland diet of the Midwest, although one thing she did learn to appreciate was the art of pie-making, which Grandmother excelled at. To the annual pie dance, held in the cleaned-up barn of a neighbour, Mother prepared a single-crust tapioca-pumpkin pie, whereas Daddy baked a classical apple pie with apples from our own trees. Grandmother prepared a blueberry pie. I helped Mother prepare the filling for our pumpkin pie, and watched it bake the morning before the dance, at which few people danced and more people stood around talking and eating.

It always seemed strange to me that while she would go through the trouble of making pie crusts from scratch, Grandmother rarely ate her own. Now, when I think about it, I guess she must have been watching her waistline, which was probably close to what it was when she was quite young, for although she definitely had a woman's figure, she was quite slender. Mother, on the other hand, used to buy pre-made frozen pie crusts from the supermarket for pies and quiches. She enjoyed making savouries, and I liked the way she filled them until the crust was absolutely brimming with vegetables and cheese before pouring in just enough custard to hold it all together. I especially liked her spinach quiche with feta and the broccoli quiche with cheddar.

Mother took her meds religiously every morning. It was just about the only thing she did religiously, being an atheist. Her husband was an atheist, as well. His parents were both devout christians. One of their children, their younger daughter, was killed in a plane crash. Freak accidents cause some people to completely lose faith in a benevolent deity, but it only deepened their conviction that there was some Higher Purpose for which their daughter had been “called home.” I don't know how they felt about having an atheist for a daughter-in-law, much less their own son, but they treated me well enough. Grandmother would take me to church with her occasionally, and Mother and her husband did not seem to mind. I think they enjoyed sleeping in those Sunday mornings.

We lived next door to Mother's parents-in-law, on a farm adjacent to their own. We were in the rolling hills of central Pennsylvania, where there is no easy access to either Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. The way my mother put it, we lived in the middle of “Butt-fuck Nowhere.” The claim to fame of the nearest city was that it was the founding place for Little League Baseball. Neither Mother nor her husband were sports fans. Just another form of religion, as far as they were concerned.

It wasn't until after she changed meds again that things went badly for Mother and her husband. She was finally on a regimen that allowed her to think straight. I think it was seeing things as they really were that prompted her to seek, in vain, nontrivial employment. When they'd met, Mother was a project manager for a construction company, with projects in northern Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Maryland. She was earning a good salary that had allowed us to live in Alexandria, Virginia. After they married, Mother continued the work. She really liked, if not loved, working in the construction industry. She loved putting things together, making them work, and then presenting them to gleeful clients. Stepfather found work as a furniture maker and subcontractor for different firms, including Mum's. He built the cabinets in his shop, then drove them down to install into the homes of the company's clients.

After her accident, Mother did not return to work. She needed time to recover, and ended up leaving her job. I don't know if she ever tried to contact her old company. We were contacted by one of her better friends from college, as well as one of her professors, who wished her well, though I suspect they were really just bidding her farewell.