Happy Birthday, Mom

Yesterday was my mom’s birthday. She would have been 98 years old.  For some reason, 98 sounds very grand to me, and my mother was grand in so many ways.

Like most mother/daughter relationships, ours had its highs and lows, but we found each other at last on the first and last paid vacation of my life.

In 1977, after I had worked for a year as a staff photographer at a small rural daily in southern Minnesota, I was told that I could take two weeks—two weeks!!—of paid leave. Fortunately, I invited Mom to come along.

We loaded sleeping bags and a tent into my blue Honda hatchback, a car the size of a postage stamp, and headed out on a journey that would take us nearly six thousand miles, and into each others’ arms.

The first day, we made it to central North Dakota and set up our tent at a roadside campsite. I had never camped with Mom, but she was great. I’d forgotten how skilled she had always been building fires in our wood stove at our family cabin. 

Mom gently balanced a perfect teepee of kindling, struck a match, then softly blew the flame into a fire, gradually adding larger and larger branches until it had a life of its own. Mom and I watched her campfire dance for an hour against the dark North Dakota sky, then crawled into our little tent and fell asleep.

I heard the first raindrops around midnight, but assured myself that our trusty rain fly would keep us dry.  I dozed off again until a giant bolt of lightning lit up the tent. The drops became a downpour and then a deluge.  By 4 a.m., a small river began to flow through the middle of our tent.  We dissolved into giggles as we each rolled as far away as we could from the stream. 

By the time daylight arrived, the rain began to slow, and our tent tributary became a puddle.  Everything was drenched.  I opened the hatchback, and we threw the whole wet mess into the back of my car and then drove off in search of a laundromat. 

One of the sweetest memories of my life is of standing with Mom, both of us in our long johns, sipping hot chocolate and laughing as a pair of industrial strength dryers tumbled our tent, sleeping bags, and clothing into dry submission.   It was the perfect disaster to launch our odyssey to know and forgive each other as adult women.

Happy Birthday, Mom.