on mother's day

This one's hitting me a lot harder than last year, my first year without a mom. Last year, I had Dad, hand-in-hand, across the table, a hug and quiet company. This year I am alone.

I talked to Dad yesterday, in the morning (my morning, his noon). He says it's been raining on Long Island, all week and expected all weekend. He says the lawn looks good. I say it's hot here, in New Orleans, almost 90 degrees each day. Summer has already come. We've only the humidity to look forward to.

He is stir-crazy, stuck in the house with all this rain, and the sun is beaming while we talk, making him antsy. He's bought flowers for the yard and wants to plant them. We close with that note. His need to get his hands dirty. To go outside and play.

We talk good now. Have conversations. This was not always the case. It took my mother's death and the year we mourned together to bring this change.

We spoke for thirty minutes yesterday. Enough time to cover all the bases (work, health, love, life) and share a story or two. We are both grateful for our boring lives - we talk every week and not much changes in the interim. We agree that this is nice - the boring - since change is a-coming or has just past (he is thinking retirement and a long-distance move; I am still settling in and hoping to settle down).

He did tell his plans for today, Mother's Day: visits to our ladies, his Mom and mine. Loretta and Natalie. Should he go through with it, it'll be a long day on the road: their gravesites are at least fifty miles apart. And he lives smack dab between them.

So do I. Despite the miles and the years (Granny died in 1982), I hover between these women. My north and south poles.

(What's that make the men? The tropics and circles around my world? Does that make my Dad the equator?)

I wrote the draft of this post, as I do much of my writing, in a bar. At the time of the scribble, it was 10:30pm, on a Sunday night in New Orleans (which is my Saturday night, and for a great many other, just another night), and there are only nine people here. Including the bartender.

Today, I went shopping - to Walmart (I know, I know. I'm poor.) and to the local grocery. Both were relatively empty. I waited no time to check out.

It seems most folks are with folks, with their families, with their mothers. I knew that Mother's Day was one of the busiest restaurant days of the year (up there with Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve), but who knew it could kill retail and decimate the pubs?

I sure didn't. Not until I was motherless.