Mother’s Day: Savor It…and Save It

(This is a column we first published in 1997. It’s been tweaked over the years as my own perspective changes! Hope you enjoy it. –SBL)

One morning about a hundred years ago, 54-year-old Agnes Bailey took a walk around the farm in search of her five-year-old son. She found him perched with the pigeons, way up in the tip-top of the soaring open rafters of the barn.

Agnes was my great-grandmother, and I wish I knew more of that story. I wish I knew more about her whole life…how it felt to bear a child at age 49 on a remote farm without plumbing or electricity…to boil diapers on a wood-burning stove and hang them to dry in an icy Michigan wind…to keep an eye on an inquisitive little one while doing things like catching and butchering chickens for a noontime dinner for family and migrant workers. (And I think just cooking seems hard some days!)

I wonder…did her hard life weigh her down? Or did she bear it lightly, humming as she churned butter, trading wisecracks with my great-grandpa as they stoked the fire, tapping her feet to the music of her life? I wonder how she got that little barn-climber down safely, and whether she squeezed him tight, slapped him silly, or both.

But there is no one alive who can tell me the rest of the story, or much else about what life was really like for Agnes.

Mother’s Day always brings to my mind the long line of mothers who preceded me, caring for children in circumstances almost unimaginably hard. I want to remember those women with gratitude, but who were they? It’s our loss, I think, how quickly and completely the details of their lives have vanished.

Do you have memories that no one else knows, stories of your mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother? Write them down! Or record them, or have someone videotape you talking about them. Some stories need to be told now or never! If someone had gotten my Grandpa Bailey to do more talking while he was still alive, I might know how his mother helped him get down safely from his barn-top perch, and maybe a whole lot of other things about a woman whose hard work and late-life child bearing were part of the series of miracles that brought me here to this moment, alive and enjoying this beautiful Florida spring.

So, let me encourage you as I encourage myself: Don’t just savor your memories — save them! If nothing else, write me an e-mail about your earliest memory of a grandmother or great-grandmother. Then you’ll at least have the e-mail to save for your own grandchildren! And I’d love to read the stories.

Happy Mothers Day to those who celebrate the day! And as always, thanks so much for reading Our Town.