Listen to Jim’s 3-minute audio podcast: https://youtu.be/JDUuun_koV0

or read his story below…

PURPLE AND PINK MOTHER

(In sweet memory of Frances Lee McGee Reed, 1913-1997 A.D.)

You would have enjoyed knowing my mother.

Mother was, among many other delightful things, a piddler.

In my generation’s mind’s eye, a piddler is someone who piddles around, doing things that are very important to the piddler but of almost no importance to anyone else.

After knowing Mother for all her 83 years, I came to understand and appreciate piddlers, and indeed I’ve become a piddler myself.

When she was alone, Mother loved nothing better than to piddle around in the yard, talking to the flowers and plants, chatting merrily with any animals that happened to stray into her line of vision, and exchanging pleasantries with folks who caught her eye.

She would trim, dig, plant, rearrange, fondle, dust, and wash anything at all that she came in contact with in her yard.

On days when she couldn’t get outside, Mother would piddle around inside the house, doing much the same things that she did outside, except that when house-bound, she would write notes and letters and cards. Much of the time these notes and letters and cards, jotted down on any scrap or pad that presented a paper surface, would be addressed to herself—notes about things she needed to do, notes about her feelings of happiness or anger and frustration, notes about things she hoped other people would do, notes about her hopes, notes about her small despairs.

Other notes would be left around the house and inside just about anything, and they would be notes about what she would like to do in the future, or notes that she hoped her family would read someday, or notes describing things she did not want our family to forget.

She left notes on the backs of hanging pictures and photographs, so that we would not forget who and what they were all about, and she never abandoned her firm belief that each and every note, each and every scrap of paper, was just as precious as all the wonderful stuff she accumulated.

Mother never willingly threw anything away, much to the joy of some of her children, much to the horror of some of her children.

Mother’s home was a time capsule, and she always hoped that somebody would come along and appreciate each and every bit of paper and odds and ends as much as she had appreciated them.

So, not too long after her death, we five brothers and sisters gathered at our childhood home and began unsealing Mother’s time capsule. We spent our brief hours enjoying and reminiscing and mourning the one and only greatest piddler of all time.

Soon after Mother’s funeral, I dragged myself out the front door of our home some fifty miles from where I was born. In the middle of winter I made my way halfway down the sidewalk before I realized that for no reason at all our Japanese magnolia tree had pink-and-white-and-purple-blossomed itself into full beauty.

A piddling tree that seemed infused with the sweetness of Mother’s soul.

Pink and purple were Mother’s favorite colors, you know.

Thanks for another note, Ma

© 2019 A.D. by Jim Reed