What mothers know
Every now and then, my mom would look out on a low grey sky (of the sort we’ve been seeing so often in Michigan in the last month) and say “That’s a snow sky.”
What’s odd about this is that she was looking at a south Louisiana sky, whence no snow would come. But that was something she knew, something she wanted to pass on to us. And after 15 winters in Michigan, I can say that she was right. Those are the kind of skies that bring snow, be it be a flurry or several inches or a blizzard.
I wonder sometimes where she picked up that knowledge. How does someone born in New Orleans and raised in Baton Rouge and often visiting the family home in Crowley come to know about snow? From the one winter she spent in New Haven? Perhaps. I like to think that her father, born in northern Tennessee with family stretching back up into Kentucky, told her that bit of useless information looking at those same grey south Louisiana skies.
It’s kind of a tease, telling a Louisiana child about snow, but you never know where life will take that child. I can imagine her looking out on a Connecticut sky 55 years ago and thinking, “Oh! That's a snow sky - Pop told me about those!” And so she told me, just in case, neither of us dreaming that I would spend these many winters in Michigan, or that my sister and her family would see so many Wisconsin snow skies.
More often, I remember her saying, as puffy thunderclouds seemed to fill the sky, threatening a cancelled picnic, or a valuable summer afternoon spent inside, "Look - there’s just enough blue to patch a Dutchman’s pants!" Even in those years before we learned about being politically correct, that seemed a bit old-fashioned to me, and I’m certain that was something she heard often from her mother or grandmother or great-aunt.
And oh, the storms that has gotten me through! Not the image of the Dutchman’s pants so much as that indomitable ability to look at the gathering clouds, to acknowledge the threats and darkness and coming wetness - and in the face of that, see the blue. As clearly as there was gloom, there was also a bright blue patch: the promise of hope, light, newness, change, all as incontrovertibly present as the looming thunderclouds. I think of these words: ”He, watching over Israel, slumbers not, nor sleeps” which I always hear in Mendelsohn’s setting in Elijah. We hear it too in these words, also memorably set: “The sun’ll come out tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there'll be sun!”
Someone asked me once how I remember her, how I miss her, how I grieve her. I was tongue-tied and confused and, as I recall stammered out not much of an answer. I should have said what was in my mind then, though it seemed not to be serious an answer to the question: Most often she is present to me singing. At times I can hear her voice as clearly as though she were standing beside me in the church pew, or sitting around the campfire: always joyful, always loving, always singing to that patch of blue.
And I can but raise my voice to join hers.
What’s odd about this is that she was looking at a south Louisiana sky, whence no snow would come. But that was something she knew, something she wanted to pass on to us. And after 15 winters in Michigan, I can say that she was right. Those are the kind of skies that bring snow, be it be a flurry or several inches or a blizzard.
I wonder sometimes where she picked up that knowledge. How does someone born in New Orleans and raised in Baton Rouge and often visiting the family home in Crowley come to know about snow? From the one winter she spent in New Haven? Perhaps. I like to think that her father, born in northern Tennessee with family stretching back up into Kentucky, told her that bit of useless information looking at those same grey south Louisiana skies.
It’s kind of a tease, telling a Louisiana child about snow, but you never know where life will take that child. I can imagine her looking out on a Connecticut sky 55 years ago and thinking, “Oh! That's a snow sky - Pop told me about those!” And so she told me, just in case, neither of us dreaming that I would spend these many winters in Michigan, or that my sister and her family would see so many Wisconsin snow skies.
More often, I remember her saying, as puffy thunderclouds seemed to fill the sky, threatening a cancelled picnic, or a valuable summer afternoon spent inside, "Look - there’s just enough blue to patch a Dutchman’s pants!" Even in those years before we learned about being politically correct, that seemed a bit old-fashioned to me, and I’m certain that was something she heard often from her mother or grandmother or great-aunt.
And oh, the storms that has gotten me through! Not the image of the Dutchman’s pants so much as that indomitable ability to look at the gathering clouds, to acknowledge the threats and darkness and coming wetness - and in the face of that, see the blue. As clearly as there was gloom, there was also a bright blue patch: the promise of hope, light, newness, change, all as incontrovertibly present as the looming thunderclouds. I think of these words: ”He, watching over Israel, slumbers not, nor sleeps” which I always hear in Mendelsohn’s setting in Elijah. We hear it too in these words, also memorably set: “The sun’ll come out tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there'll be sun!”
Someone asked me once how I remember her, how I miss her, how I grieve her. I was tongue-tied and confused and, as I recall stammered out not much of an answer. I should have said what was in my mind then, though it seemed not to be serious an answer to the question: Most often she is present to me singing. At times I can hear her voice as clearly as though she were standing beside me in the church pew, or sitting around the campfire: always joyful, always loving, always singing to that patch of blue.
And I can but raise my voice to join hers.