My mother’s plane ride, LaGuardia to Cincinnati (back when you could get a direct flight), must’ve been impishly tormenting. Lured by the possible capacity for goodness described by the voice, perpetually short of breath, on the other end of the line, she had packed her bags with the expectation of a year of service deep in the mountains of Appalachia. The word decade hadn’t yet entered into her conscience.
“Were there cars when you were my age?” I accosted my father with such questions, left unresolved until I was older, upon realization that elderly did not equate to primitive. He was born into a chicken coop, raised on the taste of soup beans on Sunday evenings, watching the sweat drip down the side of glass of iced tea on a hot summer day.
My mother grew up in a ranch style, my father on a ranch. They both sat down to dinner at six.
Whisperings of concertos by the likes of Beethoven and Bach, Ravel and Rachmaninoff ushered in the Tuesday night spaghetti dinner after the Tuesday afternoon meeting of Boy Scout Troop #3, Ardsley, New York. Mamaw was not allowed to sit down in the house where the phone was left ringing unless she answered.
In the comfort of the mountains I learned to read and sing and weep. I learned to say I was allergic to meat outside my house, swerved around the used condoms when we went bike riding in the park on Saturday mornings. I learned to accept how many people were praying for me, my jokes about Jesus not as funny to them as they were to us.
My father taught me algebra in the bathtub, the angle necessary to pour a perfectly foamed beer and the surface area of cinnamon necessary for toast. My mother? Everything else. She played the dulcimer in our family until we left when the leaves turned gold.
I now live in a ranch style, far from a ranch. A converted mountain woman.
lovely
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