About My Mother

by Peggy Rowe

  “Come on, Thelma,” they’d shout. “Let’s get something going here!” My mother was a flaming cheerleader!

  I had no way of knowing that this very same passion that had made my life miserable the summer of 1955 would one day save my mother’s life and bring her face to face with her heroes in 2003. But there are a lot of stories to tell before we get to that one.

  Home Fires

  If you couldn’t live on a ranch and be a cowboy, Leslie Avenue was the next best place. There were no mansions or dilapidated shacks on Leslie Avenue—just ordinary houses with doors that were hardly ever locked. It was the 1940s, before cookie-cutter houses were invented, so kids didn’t wander into the wrong kitchen at mealtime.

  Our brown-shingled two-story was the best house on the block. Not because it was the tallest or the cleanest (although it was). But because it had a front porch big enough for a glider and games of jacks and pickup sticks—or, in my big sister’s case, tea parties with paper dolls dressed in the latest fashion. The sturdy railings were perfect for straddling like a horse or for jumping off if I had to escape from a posse. Under the porch was the ultimate hideout—for when my mother was calling me.

  The very best feature of Leslie Avenue was the gutter that ran along our side of the road and carried off rainwater and the milky liquid from laundry tubs. On washday or after a storm, it was perfect for leaping over, like the water jump at the Grand National horse race. During a dry spell, it served as an obstacle course for daredevil bicyclists when your mother wasn’t watching. Unfortunately, mine always was. Mom had grown up in the country as the oldest of six children and was an expert when it came to taking charge. With her father at sea fishing and her mother preoccupied with a vegetable garden the size of Rhode Island, giving orders came as naturally to Thelma Williams as hauling water from the well and slop buckets to the outhouse.

  Nothing irritated my mother more than seeing me have a good time, especially outside in front of the neighbors. Just let me gallop through the yards like a horse, jumping over garbage cans and lawn furniture, and she’d put an end to it as quick as if I had set fire to the laundry on the clothesline.

  Another thing my mother couldn’t tolerate was idle hands. “Come on, Peggy, I need help washing windows.”

  “Come on, Peggy, those garden weeds are calling.”

  “Come on, Peggy, those dishes aren’t going to wash themselves.”

  There was no such thing as climbing a tree while my mother was doing her hummingbird impersonation, flitting from chore to chore, never landing.

  Mom was a fan of proverbs. “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right!” she preached as I crawled around the floor like Cinderella dusting baseboards and chair legs. She didn’t care a fig about child labor laws. If she said it once, she said it a hundred times: “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”

  If I was Cinderella, my father was the favored stepsister. He never got yelled at for not putting his things away. He didn’t have to listen to, “Do this, do that, get your roller skates off the stairs,” every five minutes of his life. Never once did my mother shake her finger at him and say, “Carl, there’s a place for everything and everything in its place!” Daddy didn’t even have to walk across the bedroom floor to the closet. His personal valet laid his freshly laundered clothes on the bedside chair each morning.

  After supper, while my sister, Janet, and I did the dishes, Daddy sat on the living room sofa listening to Amos ‘n’ Andy and Duffy’s Tavern. “Here you go, honey,” Mom would say, delivering his hot coffee and apple pie like she was one of those drive-in waitresses.

  Dad got to do all the fun stuff, like pushing the noisy lawn mower in the summer and shoveling shiny coal into the furnace in the winter. He was the only one strong enough to open those “blasted” upstairs windows and pry the lids off Mom’s canned grape jellies and pickles.

  My sister was four years older and stayed busy being charming and getting stars on her papers at school. My mother was forever bragging about her.

  “Janet has enough grace and poise for the entire neighborhood,” she’d say—whatever that meant.

  One evening, my father came home from work late. We were finishing supper when there was a clattering racket in the driveway. Mom jumped up and ran to the window.

  “Well, Peggy, the chickens have come home to roost!” I’d heard her say this before so I knew better than to expect a flock of brown hens like the ones in Grandma’s yard. “You left your tricycle in the driveway once too often, and your father ran over it with his truck.” She shook her finger. “You’re in trouble now, young lady. Just you wait until he gets in here.”

  The thought of my father being angry was as far-fetched as my mother being lazy, but I wasn’t one to take chances and scooted beneath the dining room table.

  The kitchen door opened and closed. There was whispering, and my father’s legs appeared beside the table as he pulled out a chair and sat.

  “Somebody left your tricycle in the driveway, Peggy, and I’m afraid I ran over it with my truck. I’m sorry you didn’t put it away. Now you won’t have anything to ride with your friends.”

  I scurried from under the table sobbing and buried my face in his shirt. It was dirty and smelly, but I didn’t care. Daddy sounded like he was going to cry, and it was my fault.

  The tricycle was beyond repair, but I was ready for a bicycle anyway, which I never once left in the driveway!

  Our first family crisis came in 1942. It lasted one whole long, long day and changed our lives for years to come. I was only four at the time and way too busy being an indentured servant to notice the drama surrounding me. But my mother would speak of it often that year and in the years that followed as only she could—with theatrics that left me spellbound.

  “Your father is in the war, you know,” she would say whenever the topic of WWII came up. “He doesn’t carry a gun. His tools are different, but he was drafted just like the soldiers in uniform.” Then her eyes would get misty, as she remembered that infamous day—usually while we were doing some quiet chore together, like folding the laundry or shelling butter beans.

  “It was a cold Tuesday morning in February,” according to Mom. “I had just finished the breakfast dishes when the doorbell rang. I peeked around the curtain, and there was the mailman standing on the porch holding a white envelope. I said to myself, Now, why doesn’t he just put it in the mailbox like he usually does?

  I knew the ending, but always watched wide-eyed like it was a brand-new story I had never heard.

  “Then I noticed his expression—like he had just run over our dog. ‘Good morning, Joe,’ I said, but he handed me the envelope without saying a word. Your father’s name was typed, and the return address was Washington, D.C. I stared at it for a long time, then stuck it in that drawer right over there by the stairway.”

  Then, according to Mom, she scooped me in her arms and cried, which was hard to believe, as she wasn’t the crying type.

  It was a day filled with dread, apparently. By the time Daddy returned from work and Janet from school, Mom and you-know-who had cleaned our already spotless house from top to bottom and cooked a special dinner. Probably fried chicken, my father’s favorite—and steamy, creamy mashed potatoes with a puddle of butter on the top, and a mess of greens like the ones Grandma grew in her garden. The kind that make bones and teeth strong, and, children gag.

  “After you and your sister were tucked into bed that night, I took the letter from the drawer and gave it to your father. It was one typewritten page with a beautiful brownish golden eagle at the top.”

  They read the letter together, and Mom cried what she described as “tears of relief.” My father’s wartime service would be in a town just fifty miles down the road. Our mother explained it to my sister and me as only she could, being way ahead of her time when it came to “spin.”

  “President Roosevelt needs Daddy’s help in Washington, D.C. Your father will be in charge of keeping the lights on
in the nation’s capital while our country is at war.”

  I wasn’t sure why the president couldn’t turn on his own lights; he must have been frightfully busy. But so it was. While our neighbor’s son, Bob, and my Uncle Charles put on uniforms and traveled across the ocean with rifles, my father put on his freshly laundered work clothes (laid out on his bedside chair) and drove down the road to our nation’s capital with the tools of a master electrician. There, he kept the lights on in the Navy Yard and The Pentagon, and for all I knew, President Roosevelt’s kitchen. We got to see him on Sundays if we were lucky.

  Our old next-door neighbor, Mr. Smith, was fond of saying, “War is hell!” I knew what he meant the day my sandbox was dragged behind the garage to make room for a “victory garden.” To compensate for my loss, Mom gave me a small patch of my own and a handful of seeds and showed me how to water and weed my plants. My hard work and patriotism paid off with juicy red “victory melons.”

  Mrs. Smith hoarded sugar when we couldn’t find any to buy. So much for dessert. One day my sister came home from visiting the Smith’s daughter with some news that made my mother laugh out loud.

  “Guess what? The Smith house is overrun with ants! You should see them. Crawling on the floors and all over the kitchen walls. They were even on the table, and Mr. Smith swears he saw some in the refrigerator. Mrs. Smith is screaming and acting all crazy. Do I have ants in my hair, Mom?” she asked, scratching.

  When she stopped laughing, my mother looked through Janet’s hair then said something shocking, in her outside voice. “Well, it serves her right!” I knew this was serious because our family didn’t talk mean about anybody. I kept an extra close watch on my garden patch in case Mrs. Smith decided to start hoarding watermelons.

  While Janet was busy being “Miss Perfect” at school, I was busy being my mother’s mule, trudging hundreds of miles a week to the grocery store. Coming home, we’d set down our heavy bags and collapse on the front lawns of strangers.

  “Why can’t we shop when Daddy’s home on Sunday? We could ride in the car.”

  Instead of reminding me that grocery stores were closed on Sundays, Mom would raise her eyebrows at such an unpatriotic notion and get all dramatic.

  “Some children are put on trains and taken far away from their mothers and fathers. They have to live with strangers while the war is on!”

  “They’re lucky they don’t have to walk and lug grocery bags,” I said. At times like this, she brought out the big guns.

  “Children your age are hiding in bomb shelters at this very minute, afraid that their houses will be blown to bits!”

  As feelings of guilt washed over me, she would take a piece of penny candy from her purse for each of us, and we’d be on our way.

  When Daddy worked weekends, it was my mother who shoveled the shiny black coal and pushed the noisy lawn mower.

  Uncle Charles came to visit and looked so handsome in his dark blue sailor suit and white cap that my mother’s eyes filled with tears. Aunt Betty was an Army nurse in far-off places our family had only read about in books. We wrote to them and prayed extra hard at bedtime. My grandmother in Virginia traced their journeys on a map spread across her oak dining room table, nearly ruining it with her tears. On her sideboard was a newspaper article about Uncle Charles’s warship. Alongside were two carved wooden elephants Aunt Betty had sent all the way from India.

  On one visit home, Aunt Betty brought my mother beautiful brass candlesticks. Our neighbor’s son, Bob, brought his mother a beautiful war bride with a funny accent. Mom said she would have been happier with brass candlesticks.

  My father’s adventures might not have been as exciting as Uncle Charles’s, but I was proud when I saw a picture of President Roosevelt in a brightly lit office standing beside an American flag. The only bragging Daddy did was about my mother, who had kept the home fires burning while he was keeping the president’s lights on.

  Only the Good Stuff

  Getting ready for a trip to Grandma Daisy’s was like preparing for Christmas. Delicious anticipation!

  “We’re going down home!” Mom would say with excitement in her voice and a big smile. Dad always worked on Old Bessie before we left to make sure she was up to the seven-hour journey.

  “She’s temperamental,” Mom would say, “but your father’s good with automobiles. He’ll get us there. Your father can do anything!”

  And didn’t we know it!

  Dad called Mom the organizer in the family, which was a polite way of saying the boss.

  “Now, Peggy,” she’d say, pointing her finger at me. “You go upstairs and pack some books and games for the trip! I don’t want to hear any whining from that back seat!”

  She never sounded bossy when she was giving Dad orders, but he always knew what she meant.

  “Honey, remember how the children enjoyed that old inner tube you took the last time? That was such a good idea! You even said that it would be nice to have two of them. Remember?” Dad loaded the two inner tubes, and we were on our way.

  Everybody my mother knew had heard about Fleeton. When she wasn’t boasting about her children and grandchildren, Mom was singing the praises of the small fishing village where she had spent the first twenty years of her life. She sounded like one of those travel brochures—the kind with pretty illustrations.

  “Fleeton is on a peninsula in the Northern Neck of Virginia,” she would tell her friends, looking all dreamy-eyed. She’d go on to describe the freshwater ponds and lush gardens that dotted the flat landscape. And then, everybody who hadn’t glazed over would hear about the picturesque tidal creeks and saltwater marsh grasses—“so pretty they take your breath away.”

  Mom claimed that the views from her second-floor windows were “the best in all of Fleeton, and maybe the entire Northern Neck of Virginia.”

  “I could look from my side bedroom window in the morning and see the sun rise over the mouth of the Great Wicomico River,” she’d say. “And, at the end of the day, I could look from my front window and see the same sun setting behind the very same river after it skirted around Fleeton Point.” She described Big Fleets Pond at the end of the backyard, Ingram Bay with its sandy shores, and Cockrell Creek that led north to the fish factory and the town of Reedville.

  My mother would no more mention the smelly trash and garbage and sewage that was in Big Fleets Pond when she was a girl than she would talk about Grandpop’s occasional fondness for whiskey and playing cards for money. Only the good stuff made it into my mother’s travel brochure, things like the exquisite osprey, cormorants, ducks, geese, and the ubiquitous seagulls.

  With an imagination that rivaled that of Louisa May Alcott and Emily Brontë, Mom talked about running across the rippling mudflats at low tide—leaving out the part about the seagull droppings that settled into the mud and squished between our toes. She talked about Ingram Bay without mentioning the jellyfish whose long stingers left painful red streaks on our skin; she described the delicate marsh grasses along the shore, leaving out the part about the hungry mosquitos that were big enough to carry off a small child.

  Yes, my mother preferred describing the Fleeton she saw from her upstairs windows—where you couldn’t see the chicken manure in the side yard or the bees on the clover flowers biding their time until barefoot children came out to play. She could appreciate the beauty of the cocky red roosters strutting through the grass without seeing her mother’s bloody chopping block behind the apple tree. There was nary a mention of the snakes that slithered up from the pond into Grandma’s lovely garden or the snapping turtles that could make your fingers disappear.

  Oh yes, my mother preferred the friendlier, prettier world as seen from her bedroom windows—or, shall we say, as seen from the windows of the bedroom she shared with her four little sisters growing up. I once heard my father describe those upstairs windows as “rose-colored.”

  It was a time before electronic games, so we children were left to our own devices on the journey. J
anet had her Nancy Drew Mysteries and I read horse books. We sometimes counted animals in the fields only to have to bury them when we passed a cemetery.

  Deliciously salty moist air blowing through the open car windows, filling our nostrils and making our hair straight, was an unmistakable sign that we were almost there. The final proof was the odor from the fish factory that some people referred to as nauseating. But Grandma Daisy wouldn’t hear it. “It’s the smell of money,” she’d say, as it meant the factory was processing an abundant catch.

  In no time at all we were running along the bay shore and floating over gentle saltwater swells on our inner tubes, hoping the sea nettles couldn’t reach us. When they did, Mom scraped up handfuls of mud and rubbed the hurt away. When mosquito bites peppered our arms and legs, she made a paste of baking soda and water to treat them.

  While Mom was helping Grandma Daisy with gardening or canning or washing clothes in the backyard, Dad taught my sister and me how to fish through holes in the wharf at the end of the road. He laughed loudest of all when we pulled up a perch or a spot.

  I told my friends at home about the two-seater outhouse at the end of the path, but I don’t think they believed me. There were no words to describe the odor of the slop jar in our bedroom before we carried it to the outhouse in the morning. I even told my friends about the well and the water pump in the backyard, but they weren’t impressed.

  “Here it comes!! I shouted when I saw the big mail truck heading down the road to the post office.

  “Hold your horses,” Dad would say. “We have to eat our lunch first.”

  Mr. Harding’s store was the place to go in Fleeton. As in the only place to go. It was the highlight of my day, but not because of the neighbors who gathered around the mail slots at the post office end of the store talking about the weather, the fish, or the news. Today, we were the news.