Up the Hill Alone

They were two pewter candlesticks, a pewter bowl and a pewter vase—all with strongly and somewhat crudely rustic Norwegian designs. Oh, and a Russell Wright bowl which I had given her to match the Russell Wright vase, which she already had. So—six objects, and I was sobbing over them. That was all that was left of her.

It wasn’t, of course. It just felt that way, those six objects that had been taken out of my mother’s house a month ago and sent to New York. A renter has been found for the house in the woods where my mother had lived and where she had died, and so John and Jeanne had gone out and taken even more of the personal possessions out the house. And that meant that when I came into their apartment four days ago—I was greeted by the Norwegian chest that had been in the place she had designed for it all those years ago. (Note—I just added it up, and it’s over thirty years….)

It looked beautiful, it looked wrong. And I decided, it would be best to go around the apartment while I was along—examine every nook and cranny, and find everything from my mother’s house that was now living in my brother’s house.

Winnie the Pooh—the edition from 1946—was on the tea table. The blue and white ginger bowl was in the hall. There were some post Art Deco-ish vases of which my mother had been fond. And there was a whole raft of small pieces that we had to go through.

“The trouble was the coffee ladies,” I told John. “Every time a member of her coffee klatch went off somewhere, they had to bring something home, and then Franny had to put them somewhere and keep them there forever because who could offend the coffee ladies?”

She was like that….

So John and I went through the box, and soon made a game of it.

Marc (holding reproduction Egyptian cat): Barbara Shaw in the souks of Cairo!

John (moving his head sideways like an Egyptian, imitates native): 50 piasters.

Marc (imitating Barbara): 50! 25, and not a piaster less!

Life teaches you how to get through some moments—and no, no tears were shed over the chulerías that Franny had had forced on her all those years. But what to do about the stuff she had used, had liked, had admired? Such as the Russell Wright stuff, or the Norwegian pewter?

“The last thing we need is more stuff,” I said to Jeanne. “Who else do you know who has eight or ten china sets between them? Oh, and three sets of silver?”

But it also seemed like I had to have them—and what, beyond memories, do I have of my mother? And that’s when the thought hit—this is all that’s left of a woman who had laughed and loved and told stories and wept on the passing of her man. I had held her ashes in my hand and thrust them into the earth—and that I did dry-eyed.

I looked down at the six items on the floor and thought of her hands holding them, lifting them to her eyes. I saw the roadside flowers we had gathered that would go into the Wright vase that would end up on the Norwegian wood-burning stove. I thought of the time I had played cello at Herb Fritz’s barn in Spring Green. Fritz, a friend of my parents and a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, had long died; his widow, Eloise, was soldiering on. And on the grand piano was a beautiful plain blue vase, with sunflowers stuck into it.

“Our own van Gogh, as Herb used to say” said Eloise.

It was the last time I had played for my mother.

“How much stuff is still in the house?” I asked Jeanne.

Who may have taken it as criticism—“there was just no way we could get it all out in one weekend,” she said.

“It’s not that, I just want to know how much more of this I have to go through…”

The answer?

Some more.

There’s a house in the middle of the Wisconsin woods that, one day, will be another man’s or woman’s pride and problem—not John’s, who is waking up at 3AM to worry about it. There will be a long, graveled driveway wending through green woods in summer, gold in fall, and grey and black in winter—and that driveway, once so welcoming, once leading to arms yearning to hold me? That driveway will tell me ‘no, not today.’

‘She came and she went about her business, but she’s gone. And you should go, too. Go away—back to your life, back to the living. Let her molder here, if she wills, or slip through her woods on the back of the cold winter winds, of sit on the rocks you both sat on, when you were wailing. When she could wail. And now?’

‘She could be rough, that mother of yours. Remember how she told John, who was wailing for a lost child, that he had to suck it up, stop crying, get on with his life? And why? For Jeanne. So he squared his shoulders and did it. Now, let’s see you’

And I do it, of course. I square my shoulder and lift my chin and turn around and begin the trudge up the hill…

…alone.