For my Mom

A mother hen will do everything to protect her young chicks. This afternoon I asked my own mother how she liked to be loved. She said, “I just want to have fun.” When I walk through the grocery store with my mom I sometimes pretend that I am blind. I bump into shelves and knock into ramen noodles and stacks of two liters, and she will come right up to me and say, “Stop. Zachary. You’re embarrassing me.”

I remember my Mom used to pick cucumbers from the garden. She would slice onions nice and thin and mix these with cukes, vinegar, and water. And in the summer these crisp treats could really cool you down after all day outside. 

She said it’s 97 degrees today in Iowa, that she’d like to go out and pull weeds, but there would be nobody there to find her body when she died of heat stroke. Definitely not her children. She said her friends in the book club love her more than her children.

She says a lot of things. Supposedly these women are involved in a spiritual endeavor where they help one another. I think it’s really just an excuse to eat cake. My mom said the strawberry guava I ate sounded delicious. She said she sometimes likes fruit when she is craving chocolate, and I told her she could eat cacao nibs or a bar that’s eight-five percent cacao. She said she prefers milk chocolate.

“So really you like milk and sugar.”

“I just like a treat. To reward myself.”

“For reading all those books?”

“Zachary.”

“For surviving kids who don’t love you.”

“Oh Jesus.”

Her own mom used to say my name with a long extension on the first syllable a Zahhhhhh….followed by a Kreeeee….and I seemed to be always in trouble with her as well.

I’d tell my mom of all the love I have for her. I’d tell her, but she still thinks that a post on facebook is a text message sent directly to her, so I will say this, the way that she taught me to laugh, to see the ludicrous, the way she has peed her pants while playing the piano with her sister because both of them laughed so hard they couldn’t take it. My mom wants to have fun. She wants the habit brain to break. She wants these days to be a road of joy. And she deserves this.

My mom, she carried me and supported me when nobody knew what to do. She never gave up on me. My mom, she always asked questions. Even today.

“So it’s like a cross between a strawberry and a guava?”

“No. It’s just red. It tastes like a sweet squishy lemon.”

I should say that my mom taught me to drive. She would ride in the passenger's seat when I was thirteen and then later she rode with me as I pulled up to cars at red lights and told them, “Your back right tire is flat.” And then she’d yell at me again and say Zachary and we’d drive away because the tire wasn’t really flat.

My mom, she cut my friend’s hair in high school. After errantly taking a chunk down to the skin, she got a black magic marker to blend in this new do, only to find the marker had faded and my buddy had a purple blotch on his skin. 

Sometimes my mom fakes this laugh that sounds like she’s going into cardiac arrest, that sounds like a cartoon character or a big fat cigar smoking manager for the New York Yankees. 

If I were there in Iowa today I would pull weeds for my mom. I wouldn’t even tell her that the word weed is a notion coined by a capitalistic system that needs us addicted to gasoline and poison. I would say, got this one and that one and what’s next.

I’m not sure what any of this has to do with a blog for CRISP Farms, only that everybody has a mother, and that many of us do not realize how lucky we are. I don’t realize all the times she took me and picked me up and let me get into the car with frogs and dirty pants and ideas that might drive anybody insane, and she would sit, and she would listen, and she would encourage me to be me.

Were it not for her, I would have none of this. I would not have spent an hour spitting the seeds of the strawberry guava into an empty spice jar of water and mindfully sucking the pulp from each and every one, able to see the future. Able to see plants that do not yet exist. See…she taught me to see the future. She taught me that I could do anything.

And so, I guess I write this to help her remember the same.