She Gave Us Everything

Only now do I see this

She sang in her kitchens, sweet lilting notes Baked into the apple pies she taught herself to bake, Between tragedies and tumult of a life that unfurled Differently than it was supposed to do, all her efforts Notwithstanding to do right, to be good, to do her best To live an extraordinary life with love and magic Twined in every day of hard work and harder words.

Only this morning, sipping tea she would have loved, Did I realize she was a storyteller in how she lived life, Not in words scribbled on page or told to rapt others Cherishing her every word, clasping hand-knit sweaters She made to keep us warm in houses she made into homes Expecting us to leave her and hoping we’d do well In the great wide world she never got to wander.

When I was sick, she gave me Austen, brought mugs of tea, Left me to plummet into imagination and books While teaching me to sew and hold a baby Because you never know where life will take you When you’re natural-born storyteller who lived A story you never would have asked for if you’d known What was coming — or maybe she welcomed it anyway.

I will never know what she thought of her life, left With sticks, smears of memory about times she raged Or knit a small square for the cat to love as its own Precious darling when her own couldn’t wait to leave The homes she gave everything to fill with her love And boundless enthusiasm and imaginative daring Until she was emptied of all she had to give.

I write this in honor of a woman who studied hard, worked even harder, to live a good life with a good man, fill a house with laughter, love, and children.

When nothing matched her dreams, she dug in and grew into her best to what she was given.

It was a soft, hard life, compared with where she fled from, honestly and carefully laying it out for herself, open-hearted and blind-sided, knocked down and getting up again and again.

Soft because there was enough food to eat and money to pay exorbitant bills to care for the ones who needed it more. Flowers could be planted with lilting songs, mink stole worn to church on holidays, rooms wallpapered with confident, sure hands and filled with new furniture.

Hard because of the raging and never-ending heartbreak and worries what would happen to everyone else if she retreated to a new life in her own little corner.

In the end, she left us without leaving — and we muddled on through.

Only today, does another truth wriggle into being.

Mind drifting loose and easy toward brightening horizon, I sip steaming tea too soon.

Scalded tongue is outraged.

A wily thought wriggles through.

My mother was a storyteller.

Her stories were beautiful, sweeping sagas studded with courage and cunning innocence.

I am storyteller born to a family of storytellers.

We are all of us so very different — and yet we are truly the same.

Not what we have lived, but in what we have made of it with tea shared with loved ones.

I promise her I will continue through heartbreaks novel and uninvited.

I promise to tell my stories and insist on being heard.