It's been 8 years, 5 months, 25 days since my Mom, Gloria Alice Kirchhoff Gahr, passed away on 16 November 2005. She was 74 1/2 years old. She was remarkable, but it still really wasn't enough time. She was a storyteller, an artist, musician, family chef, gardener and so many other things... she was a Renaissance woman, always interested in everything, there was no concept or project or form of creativity that she was afraid to tackle. So, our childhoods were magickal... as I'm sure you can imagine.
She was the youngest daughter in a family of 10 children with 3 girls and 7 boys. She was #8 of the lot, iirc. Among her memories of her childhood were cooking for her family when she was 5 years old, standing on a stool, because her mother had narcolepsy. There were plenty of painful stories too, but we rarely heard those.
Mostly we heard the stories of her and her brothers, Jack & Rex, running about generally being hoodlums... going down into a neighbor's spring house and throwing rocks at the windows to break them out and things like that. Once she saved a chipmunk from her dog, an Irish setter, but not before the critter's tail was chewed off by the dog. She and her brothers performed surgery with scissors and saved the chipmunk's life: she named him Stumpy and he lived in a coffee can filled with horsehair jack cut out of one of the horse's tails. He had a little tin dish for water and when he wanted more, he would emerge and bang it on the floor. He also would ride to school in her shirt pocket. Another favorite thing she loved to talk about doing as a child was to go to a clear Missouri stream and take a huge rock and put it in her lap. She would hold her breath and open her eyes to watch the fish swim around her, especially the minnows.
She also loved the holidays... that is when the magic would really happen. We were so cocooned with love and family at that time of year, those memories are perhaps some of the happiest I will ever have. Mom in curlers running around madly on Christmas Eve making cookies and prepping for the big Christmas Day dinner... and going to midnight service... coming out in the cold air in the peaceful frosty dark. And then opening presents and the bustle of family in our always tastefully-decorated home... it was just warm and cozy, my memories are sort of soft-focused... and feel like a cozy merino wool sweater.
There are so many stories, just pieces of her life. She is with me, I know I am an awful lot like her and I'm glad. She had a great sense of humor, with a sarcastic edge. She loved to sing. Her garden was her true joy... she so loved planting seeds and watching the baby plants grow. Her flower gardens, that surrounded the rock and brick landscaping that she accomplished herself... were always the envy of the neighborhood.
She also loved to paint and sculpt. I have several of her creations and absolutely treasure them. They could never be replaced. She painted what she saw and remembered in her mind from her Southern Missouri childhood... trees, streams, covered bridges, old barns... and always in her style.
Her intellectual curiosity was never limited by her high school education or being a suburban mom of the 1950s and 60s, she always was a great reader. She loved to read almost anything... especially history and novels. She had a huge collection of the Reader's Digest Condensed Books.... and would devour them when they would arrive. She never stopped learning.
This small tribute is exactly that, small, in comparison to who she was... and was to me. One memory seems to spur another... and I could write for years about her. I just wish I'd had a few more years with her... maybe she should be the novel that I write.
As a mother this Mother's Day, I am missing my kids. They are wonderful people and I'm proud of them. My own daughter has her own daughter now... and that little enigma is amazing. I get to see her next week and I'm about to burst over that. And I get to see my son graduate from high school. The years do roll on.
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