In honor of my mother and her love for the critically endangered Monarch butterfly.
Earth mother. She had been born to nurture. Actually my
mother was born in Manhattan: her drunken father had been kicked out when Mom
was three, and her step-father departed on his own terms when my mother was
seven. To fill the vacancy, my hapless grandmother encouraged her daughter and
son to lose themselves in all the pleasures and perks of city-life that money
could buy, that is until the Great Depression.
One day, my grandmother asked
her children to pack their bags for a trip to the countryside, and without
warning, she left the boy and girl with family friends who had agreed to raise
the children. My grandmother then returned to
New York. Mother’s world had been shaken and stirred. In a young girl’s eyes
she and her younger brother had been dropped on a far away island; they had
become castaways, though they lived only two hours from the city.
Raised for much of her life by a woman—sadly, the husband
died not long after the adoption—who had the right, legally, to call herself,
“mother” but in fact acted like a distant relative, the abandoned young girl
grew into a mature woman. Mother had learned to survive. Years of scenes from Stella Dallas brought more complications
when my grandmother came and went for temporary visits. And yet Mother forgave
her mother and pushed onward to a better future.
Meanwhile, my mother became a teacher at a nearby school and
counted the days. When she met my father—a tall, handsome, ambitious man who
also carried similar emotional baggage—he swept her away from the desert, like
a prince on a magical carpet. My mother had found what she had wished for from
the age of seven: love and family.
A year later the expectant mother began another journey
where she discovered her calling: gardening. She opened her eyes and fell in
love with nature. Flowers, trees, birds, the sky, the mountains and Hudson
River, nothing escaped her attention. Eventually, she shared that gift, her
devotion to the environment to her children, though she never excluded them
from what New York City had to offer. Over the years, it wasn’t yin or yang. Each world had its own treasures.
And yet, when I remember my mother, I don’t see her as
many did and still do, sitting in a favorite Lexington Avenue neighborhood
restaurant or at an exhibit at MOMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York) I
see her, 5’2, hour-glass figure bent over a garden plot: hands, covered with brown soil; her
ever-unwieldy dark, wispy hair stuck to her forehead. Dressed in baggy jeans
and an old Brook Brothers’ white button down shirt, sleeves rolled up; her
hands grasp an old, rusty wheelbarrow.
Yes, she had joined the local and regional garden clubs,
had her term as President, won blue ribbons in flower shows, but the pleasure
she had tending her small, then later larger garden, pulling weeds, planting
flowers; trimming rose bushes; griping about predators such as deer, rabbits,
and those accursed woodchucks, did not wane.
Naturally, she tried to get her daughter involved with
some early success. However, I loved animals. The very pests that my mother
lambasted I adored. Anything that moved. At least I shared her delight in butterflies. Oh, how Mom
would beam whenever she’d see one. When I was in elementary school, she helped
me with my science project, watching the remarkable transformation of a caterpillar to a Spicebush Swallow-tail butterfly
I had called “Jane,” though we didn’t know anything about butterfly breeding
habits and had no idea about its sex. Funny, how my mother never forgot Jane
and would share the story again and again over the years.
With all that nostalgia, Mom especially adored Monarch butterflies. She
would follow their journey in the Science section of The New York Times
or nature specials; she’d sigh after she had read reports about the Monarch’s
declining population. And, Mom would love to tell the tale about a garden club
field trip where she had encountered a tree filled with migrating Monarchs. I’d
smile with her every time she’d tell the story.
Time would pull me
away from my mother’s private sanctuary. I had become an adult and wanted to
seek adventure elsewhere, sometimes thousands of miles away. We still had
common interests, yet gardening was Mother’s pastime, and wouldn’t be mine,
though she never revealed any disappointment. She did give me a multi-sensory
appreciation of Mother Earth, which I have carried with me all my life. From
wildflowers to rose bushes; from ladybugs to spring peepers; from the seductive
aroma of honeysuckle to the cry of a hawk flying overhead. Every flora and
fauna moment we shared produced a passion, a fierceness for the land. And the
sea.
Second only to her beloved garden, my mother cherished being
on the water or near the water. Not a regular swimmer, tinnitus and other pesky
physical challenges kept her from going into the ocean often. Instead, walking
the beach, while visiting friends on Cape Cod, infused her with energy and
radiance. Long before Anne Morrow Lindbergh had written her homage to the sea,
my mother had waxed poetic— in discussions and in writing—about the surging
ocean, precious seashells, and dancing sandpipers.
In nature, Mom became the child she hadn’t been allowed
to be for so long. She stayed that way for almost sixty years. And then my
father passed away. Three years and one week later, Mom followed. Only days
after I had visited her for Mother’s Day. She was 94. My mother’s unhappiness
at becoming caged, though she emphatically insisted (and the doctors had
agreed) it was what she had wanted and needed, turned to resentment. Being
deprived of her passion had sapped her
life energy. She tried for as long as she could to find the light in small
things, until her diminishing eyesight took that away, too. Mother had become a
stoic. In her mind, she had become lifeless, way before her body finally
surrendered. When my mother left this earth, she had believed she’d return to
it: “. . .ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” though in her case, it would be dust
to sand.
How could I know how the day would unfold? As I assembled
my closest friends to honor my mother, I didn’t hesitate about where we’d go. No
garden to return to, still a place just as precious. When alive, the ocean
carried her spirit away to a calm and restful place. It was only fitting we’d
return her to the sea. On a clear, crisp September morning, we drove down
toward “The Point”. Mother’s favorite walking destination at Nauset. All shared our thoughts and memories: “Oh,
how I loved your mother’s laugh.” “The flowers she did for our wedding,” or, “We’ll
never forget her.” When it came to me, I had carefully planned what I believed
she would have wanted me to do and what I wanted to say.
One of Mom’s favorite films had been a classic black and
white romance, I Know Where I’m Going, with
Wendy Hiller. No surprise that Mom had loved Scotland and taken a pilgrimage,
with my father, to the Hebrides: to see Tobermory and the phone booth—still there
at the time— next to the waterfall. (Fortunately, she didn’t learn that many of
the movies scenes were shot on a London set).
So, in honor of Mom, I handed out the words and music to
the traditional Scottish song the movie title had been taken from, and most of
the assembled poignantly sang all three verses. After I had spread Mother’s
ashes, we each threw sprigs of heather into the water. I stood in the shallows
a few minutes, alone. Then, I threw Mom a kiss goodbye.
The nipping cold reminded us it was time to go. Getting
into the truck, pictures of Mom smiling as she walked the beach jumped in my
head. How she would have loved this morning. A mostly blue sky; pure sand under
her bare feet; the briny smell of the ocean; her warm laughter, and the nurturing
sun in her face.
Before we could drive away, there was a loud knock on the
driver’s door. My friend lowered the window. From nowhere—there wasn’t anyone
else around this time of the morning and no house within easy walking distance—a
middle-aged woman appeared holding something in her hands. She looked very
concerned. “Excuse me, but can you help me?” she said. “I found this
butterfly being tossed around on the beach. I know it should be inland. Could
you take it with you and release it? I don’t have my car nearby.”
All of us agreed. Another friend in the back seat said
she would hold the wind-battered insect.
As we pulled away, I turned around and asked her, “What
kind of butterfly is it?”
“A Monarch, Wendy. Why?”
