What my mom has given me is worth fireworks

 My mom can’t read this column. 

The macular degeneration that has attacked her sight for two decades keeps her from these words as well as from the quilts she loved to make.

Boston fireworks from Robbins Farm, 2012. / Benn Craig photo

With a phone call, I can reach her at assisted living in Nazareth, Pa., where arthritis keeps her largely in bed or a wheelchair. I could read this to her, expecting her requests — to repeat … to repeat … to repeat. Her hearing aids cannot rescue her.

This is how it is at age 97, which mom turns on July 4th.

It was not always this way. Mom was born at home in 1920, the first of Bessie and Paul Lewis’s four children. Home was a dairy farm outside Washington, Pa., 40 miles south of Pittsburgh.

Hard work marked her young life. As the Depression ebbed, she went to college, then called the State Teachers College at Indiana (Pa.), but the family could not afford for her to continue after two years. She did not do well in chemistry.

She did have chemistry with a young man named Bob, who went to Washington & Jefferson College, and they married when she was 22 and he 20. He went on to get a Ph.D. in chemistry. He taught at Harvard and Lehigh University. He died last December at age 94.

This is about mom, but dad was a significant part of her history: They were married for 74 years. Ah, marriage. As we kids grew, I recall him not letting her forget how she did in chem class.

That was dad’s less-nurturing side. Mom’s was hewn by rough farm attitudes. That meant finishing work came before recognizing emotions. When her endless home tasks were done enough, she found time for feeling.

Love of reading

My love of reading flows from her — from long ago, when she sat my brother and me on either side of her and read: fairy tales, myths, the nonsense verse of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. The book from which she read had wonderful woodcut drawings, and I shall never forget the one illustrating “The Jabberwocky.” In fact, here it is >>

Mom’s nearness calmed the fright that image stirred in a child so young.

Betty Lewis Sprague, 1968

I trace to mom my love of nature after I was a little older. No matter where we lived when I was young — St. Louis, Wollaston, Mass.; near Bethlehem, Pa. — we spent most summers at the farm where mom was born.

On cow paths that wound into secret hollows (“hollahs,” my mom said), we walked, observing birds, spying craw fish (“craw feesh,” she said), identifying insects and trees.

From those strolls, I felt mom impart the art of story-telling. 

As we walked, mom talked about growing up, spinning tales, from humorous to serious, but always shaped by specific detail; for example, the one about the Mexican hired hand who lived in the basement of the 1810 farmhouse and whose redolent cooking sent up scents from a mysterious culture. I suspect my sympathy for the underdog comes from mom.

Mom prepared me

Later, when words flowed into me like a tide, I recognized how mom had prepared me for early Dylan Thomas: His “young and easy under the apple boughs” was mine, because mom and I had walked under those trees on the high hill above a real barn.

Her speech was never the high-flown Thomas — the one that goes this way: “Time let me hail and climb / Golden in the heydays of his eyes.” But her clipped sentences bursting with memory let me see “the trees and leaves / Trail with daisies and barley / Down the rivers of the windfall light.”

After I had left home too soon, and saw how her marriage and children had affected her life, I tried to write a poem for her, about the woman who had been born the day our nation celebrated its independence. I never got it right.

So I am writing this column that she cannot see, the one that I will not read to her over the phone.

In any event, I will call and tell her the parts of this story that she should know. I do love my country, but I love my mother more.

This viewpoint was published Saturday, July 1, 2017.