For My Momma

The Devotion of a Spitting Image

My guiding light, my mirror, my most generous and unconditional companion, my ride-or-die…. My momma.

To know her is to have seen her old court, to rally around, laughing at her jokes. Tuning in for her amazing stories of growing up a catholic girl in a small town and being the first in her family to go to college, earning a degree in microbiology, letting that wild hair down and smoking pot, listening to James Taylor with his father, Issac. The A frames on the commune, being naked in the woods, and protesting wars in Chapel Hill… maybe you heard about her radical move to the Navajo Nation in the 1970s, selling real estate in Durango, or the reverse, marrying her high school sweetheart after 30 years (and two kids/two previous marriages!), or the times she would stand in front of a bulldozer, unrelenting in her efforts to preserve the historic homes, warehouses and bridges in that same town where she grew up. To say she is fierce is obvious, but to share how her strength and perseverance influenced my own path is only partly crediting her for all that I am.

Beyond words, there are the things that carry her energy, are imbued with her stories.

These three heirlooms came to me this year-- a bittersweet effort to alleviate her of worry about where the baubles from a lifetime of adventure would end up. My mother’s memory has quite sadly been fading, along many of her most righteous attributes. This being part of life, the stories become all the more part of preservation. Keepsakes are for being kept. To have them, hold them, wear them is to celebrate her.

The first is her token charm bracelet from high school where she was a jock- yup she played basketball like a bat out of hell apparently- she was in drama and debate club. Essentially a Polymath (setting a high bar for yours truly!). Huge things for a small town girl. The nickel silver speaks to how they struggled financially, but in the end she was a graduate and she worked her way through college with the same goal-oriented determination that she showed with her 5’ 3” might on the court.

The gold charm bracelet was an heirloom passed to her from her chic af aunt, my name sake, who was storied, childless and travelled often by rail to New York City, buying hats for the local department store. Wildly similar paths she and I…. lest I digress on that tangent, let’s see…Well, I love the scale of these charms, so bold! The calendar charm, marked with some special date, Dec 31st 1957, and naturally, I am obsessed with the shamrock and hearts decked in diamonds and pearls. These are so Bing Bang it's almost surreal. I never met her, but her style certainly did in some strange way inform mine. I plan to add more charms to this one, celebrating my matriarchs… Ianthe, Hazeline, Suzy, Polly, Reba, Anna and Susan, my darling momma.

And then we have the coral necklace; a piece which speaks volumes. The symbolism of the material notwithstanding… it reminds me of my Mom in that 80’s peak form-- short hair, silvering, stirrup pants, pounding a ‘For Sale’ sign into the ground in front of some house way fancier than ours, blush on her cheekbones. Or kicking back, maybe with a Corona in her hand, at Navajo Lake or on the sailboat, down in San Carlos Bay, MX. She’s in my memory like my own personal Tina Turner. Always rising, ever beautiful, smiling with the snaggletooth that I inherited. And this heirloom is, of course, red, which speaks of her strength and fortitude, the fire in her veins. To hold its cool, perfectly imperfect beads, their clack in the rose impressed Cotognata dish that I brought home from Sicily— someone’s heirloom in harmony with mine.

These are the not just the things but the memories within them, which I truly savor. Because some days are shiny and some are just plain sad. To be present for someone that centers your world as they turn from vibrant to frail, well, it’s heartbreaking—and it’s also the stuff that makes love such an enormous gift. From making the best jokes about hospital socks to fond memories of her by the fireplace at the farm. The tenacity and tenderness I know were given to me, can be returned to her, with so much grit and gusto.