Mom’s Weather Forecast

“My mother had a slender, small body, but a large heart—a heart so large that everybody’s joys found welcome in it, and hospitable accommodation.” — Mark Twain.

My mother was Pauline Gunther Armstrong, and like many Southern boys, I worshiped her. Her talents as a mother were many.

Mothers have unusual ways to teach us.

She could bury a seemingly dead flower in the ground and nurture and relish its growth while reminding me I could do that with patience and faith.

She worked long hours and more than 50 years knitting socks at the Princeton Hosiery Mill, our local textile factory. Her friends were “mill women.” Many of them had sons or daughters who were my classmates.

The National Honor Society inducted some of us in my junior year, 1967, and mill management gave our mothers an hour off without pay to come to the cafeteria to attend the presentation.

I remember how proud our mothers were and how their presence was such a surprise. My mother beamed. I hugged her, but I don’t think I ever thanked her for attending.

With only a fourth-grade education, my Mom made no bones about the fact I would go to college. She and my father saved their money for me to accomplish that.

When I went to Murray State University, I was thankful for scholarships, a campus job, odds and ends of delivering newspapers and working at a weekly newspaper, and a “practice wife” working full-time.

Mother didn’t trust banks.

For many years, we tried to repay my parents as much as possible. Some of the payback became Mom’s “cold cash,” stashed in a freezer and readily accessible. Another hidden stash was under a coffee table in her formal living room. When we sorted her possessions after her passing, we found more money stuffed in an envelope in her china cabinet.

She came from poor of the poor.

Mom once told me her most memorable Christmas was the year her father gave her a goldfish. Of course, they lived in a log cabin that was not well insulated, and despite sitting the goldfish bowl on the hearth and trying to keep it warm, it froze. Mother said she cried.

Mother never had a doll as a child.

However, at her passing, she had a legion of dolls, every kind imaginable, dressed in assorted outfits from ballerinas to baseball uniforms.

We and others gifted many, some of which she found at yard sales, and I want to think even one or two were from my father, who was not the hopeless romantic that Mom and I came to be.

My earliest memories of Mom are of the two of us posing for photos at Cedar Hill Cemetery and on the steps at Butler High School, at the door that says Library. My father liked his photography.

It was a dark and stormy night.

Mom bore me into this earth on September 2nd, 1950. Rain dripped relentlessly from a crack in the ceiling onto the room floor she shared with Anita Baker’s mother. Anita and I have shared celebrations over the years. I miss those. I hope, Anita, you are healing well.

The old hospital where I was born used to sit around the  Trice Hughes Chevrolet near the underpass of the West Ky Parkway. Underneath the bridge was a frequent make-out spot when I was a teenager. That old building was still there in my teen years. However, none of us born there have a historical marker erected yet.

However, the underpass was less desirable than behind Blue Springs Church on Cadiz Road. When you go to “park” there, you must be aware of the “ghost light.”

David, Faye, Dickie, and I went searching for that light one Saturday night. It never showed itself. We left the car running for a fast escape to be safe, though.

I got a memorable kiss on a Saturday afternoon behind that church from the first girl with whom puppy love had captured me.

It was a spring day, and it was still cool. I was wearing a red sweatshirt with no undershirt. We were taking pictures of her. I can still feel the warmth of her hands under my shirt and the tenderness of that kiss.

Years later, I introduced that young lady to my wife, Kay, at one of the high school reunions. She sat beside us along with Kirt, the infamous lawyer from Lexington. She went on to be a minister.

Food was my Mom’s art and passion.

Mom was a cook of the finest southern food imaginable, unlike most I ever had. Growing up, she could turn the cheapest cuts of meat into a sumptuous meal with her gardened vegetables.

She loved to “lay the spread.” The closest food to Mom’s I can find is Mrs. Wilkes’s Boarding House on Jones Street in Savannah. However, even Mrs. Wilkes doesn’t fry up her raisin pies.

“Miss Polly,” as everyone knew her, was one of five children. Her father was Tiller Delbert Gunther, and her mother, the grandmother I never knew, died from diabetes the year before I was born.

Mom was a hugger.

Her brother Ross and sister Basil were huggers, too. I got that gene. I don’t think she ever understood why people didn’t hug more.

Let me bring home my roommates from college, and before they left, they got hugged.

I believe in hugs, as they seem to be the one thing that tries to heal our souls. And goodness knows I miss her hugs.

There was no equal on White Street or McLin Street in her later years regarding gardens and flowers. Her yard was her canvas, from nomes and concrete turtles to wind chimes and Mexican-painted flower pots. And everyone knows that with such talents, there must be yard art of every variety.

Cats loved her, and she loved them. Each was named. She became known as the “Cat Lady of McLin Street.” I believe they wailed at her passing.

Mom died, and I was not there.

Her caregiver called me, and I talked to her as Mom lay listening to me. Her passing was not unexpected, and yet it was shocking. She seemed stable when we left for D.C.; I wanted to believe that. I reassured her as she lay dying that it was okay to pass. Kay and I would be fine. It was time for her to rest. She had cared for my father throughout his illness and operations, never once complaining. She enjoyed the last years of her life immensely.

Heart failure, the coroner said. I think when my father died, her heart broke even more. It had been broken several times over the years, and only by her will of force did she mend it.

Kay and I went outside and sat in the car that day. I looked skyward, and taking off from Dulles was a United Airlines flight. Clear as possible, I believe God was telling me it was okay; UNITED said it all.

Only once can I recall my mother ever laying a belt on my behind.

I was around age 8ish or so when we lived in that short and unmemorable period in the brick house on Ratliff Street. I preferred to be from “between the tracks” on White Street, our original homeplace, which we moved back to when I was nine.

I used the “N-word,” referencing chocolate drops that we all used to get at Christmas. In retrospect, I suspect Mom always felt some degree of racism because of her darker complexion and ancestry. I understand that now, thanks to my best friend and wife. It was a lesson well learned.

Upon explaining that word was not one her son would ever use in her presence again, she took my belt and smacked my ass three times. It didn’t hurt, but it embarrassed me in front of the family. Implanting such a lesson was foreign to her raising me as a child; she did an even better job of telling me of her disappointment in me, which broke me twice to tears, I can recall.

Never in all her years, though, could I ever feel anything but overwhelming love from and for her. It was the same love she shared with my father. Despite all my and his transgressions, her heart was always open to showing love and affection.

When we talked daily, she asked, “If we were still working? And then she would give me the weather update.

These days, I am working on capturing my memories. Kay is quilting.

 And I am missing your weather reports.