[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.
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