Tag mothers

Mismatched sand dollars

Nancy Crowe

198414763_32ccdcb344_bIt’s the task adult children dread: Sorting through the detritus of a parent’s life, however well-lived, while also sorting through grief.

My mother loved her independent apartment in a Southwest Florida retirement community. She had a blast furnishing it 10 years ago, and she got to stay there until she died a couple of days after Christmas (see obit). She’d moved there on her own initiative and resisted being hustled into assisted living. Mom had already pared down quite a bit before moving into her apartment, but when you’re 90, you’ve still got plenty of stuff.

In one drawer was an abundance of earrings, many of which I could not remember her wearing. They were all organized — worn and put carefully back in place. Except for one pair of gold sand dollar post earrings. One had been bent, possibly stepped on. They were both little gold(ish) sand dollars, but they didn’t match. Their hues and patterns were different enough for me to notice, but similar enough for Mom’s eyesight. How similar are any two sand dollars on the beach, anyway?

I poked around for the other sand dollar earrings, but did not find them. That’s how it is. We accumulate experiences, emotions, relationships, scars and stuff. Not all of it matches and some of it’s a little bent out of shape, but it’s ours. We hope that what we don’t take with us will benefit someone somehow, even just to leave a smile.

The sand dollar earrings went into the “keep” box. Life doesn’t match up. Wear it and rock it anyway.

Photo credit: tashland via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Wings and water: A life in motion

Nancy Crowe 2 Comments

“Blue Heron Woman: Poems,” by Gail S. Burlakoff (2014)

This is not a review per se, as the author is a friend and former neighbor. Call it an observation.

“Blue Heron Woman” is the name given to Gail by a Cherokee-Cree medicine woman, the author bio explains, “and the name suits her; she has spent much of her life wadingBlue Heron Woman through one thing or another, watchfully waiting for the next adventure, moving from one place to another, defending her young, and surviving.”

The poems tell her story, from Hawaii just before and just after World War II to summers in the Ozarks; Panama; boarding school and college; as a “corporate wife” in St. Croix and Peru; and the end of that life and the beginning (and continuation) of another. It’s like a home movie with images that flicker by before taking off again, gradually forming a mosaic of a life.

It is not a fluid journey. There are stops and starts, joys and pains and choices. There is, Gail writes in a poem near the end of Part I, an itch to move on to something that will certainly be better — but the voices of the also well-traveled generations before her interrupt: “Halt. You are where you are for a reason. Stop, think, breathe, and be aware of who we are, Where we came from, Why we came. You are one of us, A courageous woman. Bless you.”

A blessing, indeed. I read the Kindle version of this book, but I recommend paper and ink for poetry. With an e-book I am never sure if the stanzas and line breaks are as the author intended, or if what I am looking at is simply where it all landed on the digital page. The photos, too (by Nikolai Burlakoff) would of course show up better in print.