Things My Mother Collected

A list by Dr. Alex Caldwell

1. Perfume

Some women have their signature scent. I thought my mom did, but it turns out that maybe her signature was her variety. There they were, three glass bottles, three little jewels sparkling on a polished silver tray on her worn white dresser. I thought I knew my mom. I thought the perfume in the short, fluted bottle, golden flowers and Swarovski crystals adorning the dome of its lid, was her scent—an ephemeral, flowery sillage, light and inoffensive. Whispers of Truth. I sprayed it in the air, watching the mist settle on the seafoam-green floral bedspread. If I closed my eyes it was like she was in the room with me. I half expected her to criticize my hair. 

Then I sprayed the next bottle, round and smooth like a polished rock, and realized that Whispers of Truth wasn’t her whole story. It was easy enough to mistake her other scents for something in the air—a hint of cinnamon or frankincense at Christmastime, a melancholy sandalwood on a cloudy day. I didn’t realize it was a presence she brought to the world, not the other way around.

My mom’s voice wafted in on a cloud of perfume: One for rainy days, one for holidays, one for everyday. The refrain bounced off the bed like a nursery rhyme. It could have been a nursery rhyme. I couldn’t remember her singing this to me, but here it was, lingering, her sillage.  

2. Asparagus

Everyone knew Jean Caldwell collected asparagus. When her birthday rolled around, or when she threw a Garden Club party and someone needed a hostess gift, something asparagus-themed was the reliable go-to.

My biggest question, in the beginning, was what to do with her asparagus—glass cabinets full of knick knacks and dessert plates, the asparagus dish towel still drooping over the door handle next to the kitchen sink, the asparagus potholder sitting on the counter near the stove. She even had a coffee mug, tall and narrow, that burgeoned into a tight, scaly ceramic tip. 

I didn’t want it (most of it, save the tea set painted with delicate botanical images of asparagus fern gone to seed), but it seemed wrong to just get rid of it when she’d been so proud of her collection. I could box it up, send a couple of pieces to Randi. The least my sister could do, after retreating into Florida's cloak of humidity and leaving me to sort out the house, would be to give a loving sanctuary to some of Mom's asparagus. And some for Til, maybe. It matches your hair, I'd tell her. My seventeen-year-old daughter would grimace and mumble an insincere "thanks" from behind those heavy green bangs. But she might appreciate it someday; this was her heritage. 

3. Magazines

The magazines were an easier question. I felt no compunction recycling the piles of grocery store magazines stacked in the bedroom I inhabited years and years ago. TV Guides from the nineteen eighties filled plastic storage bins. A rainbow of Cooking Light decorated the wooden racks on the light pink walls. 

"Ma, what do you keep these around for? When's the last time you opened one?" I did not hesitate to confront her about this when she was alive. It's something I brought up most visits. Was this our most consistent conversation? The thought made me angry.

"Last week," she'd insist. "You complain about the paper, but you don't complain about the pies."

The internet is full of pie recipes. Asparagus quiche, even, if an occasion ever called for it. I heaved the boxes into the blue recycling bin without stopping to look at the pages that were dog eared and paper clipped. 

4. Origami

The plastic shopping bag at the top of the laundry room cabinet, once I finally got down to the invisible, forgotten corners of the house, was a harder choice. I could easily have tossed it into the trash—run my hand through the hundreds of tightly folded paper packages to quickly check for hidden rolls of bills, then surrendered it to the landfill. 

But there was something about the deliberateness of the folds—these sheets of college-ruled binder paper, some of them beginning to curl at the corners, folded into flat origami envelopes—that hinted at their precious contents. 

I never took my mom for a writer. She never carried a spiral notebook around the house, never had a computer before her sixties. We never received personal letters in the mail, so I knew she didn’t keep correspondences. She didn’t even read much, except for her magazines. 

I picked a random envelope from the bag and untucked the crisply folded triangular flap. The paper rustled a sigh, whispering its secrets one rectangle of space at a time. 

5. Top-Ten Lists

The handwriting was definitely Mom’s. It was the same script I’d seen on grocery lists pinned to the refrigerator door under asparagus-shaped magnets, or the slips of paper she’d fold into my tin lunch box: “Good luck on your test,” or “To have friends you must show yourself friendly. Smile.” 

Her loose, looping letters, smooth and even, scrawled the title across the top of the page: Songs That Made Me Feel Things. 

I skimmed down the thin blue lines, labeled one through ten, and saw a few songs I recognized. Not songs that I could hear in her voice, but songs that had drifted across her record player or the family stereo over the years. I felt a twinge of pride to see “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” on the list. When a lovely flame dies, smoke gets in your eyes. We played it at her memorial last month. It made me feel like I knew her, after all. 

It was nothing we’d discussed. She was 77. We probably should have discussed it, but the fact was we hadn't. She never brought it up, and who am I to say “Well, Ma, you’re getting up there now. We should probably talk about what you want your funeral to be like…” And it's not like she could say anything once she was on the ventilator. 

I set her list of songs down on the cool tile counter, plunged my hand into the shopping bag, and blindly fished out another envelope. Things I’ve Almost Forgotten. Again, it was numbered one to ten, like something you’d find in a magazine, or on Buzzfeed these days—those stupid articles where you have to click through 40 pages to find out the Top 10 Things You Should Never Say To Your Husband. 

But Mom’s list was all there on one page. The smell of her. How hard it was. What it felt like to be looked at…terse, but intriguing.

I returned the open envelopes to the shopping bag without re-folding them and set the bag next to my purse.

6. Loose-Leaf Tea

Tea was a bit of a ritual for mom. When we were home sick, or when I started having menstrual cramps, I could rely on one of her steaming concoctions. The steam would fog my glasses and, for a few minutes in my warm cocoon, I was blind to the world. 

Later, when I only visited Mom from across town, a Saturday afternoon, or a quick lunch break, she’d have a cup waiting when I arrived. We’d drink and nibble the butter cookies she always had on hand, and gossip. 

That night, after Paul and Til had gone to bed, when the house was mine and quiet enough for ghosts to roam between the leather sofas undeterred by the searing eyes of skeptics, I brewed a cup of the golden oolong that I’d taken home from her kitchen cabinet. I could hear Mom's voice: two minutes at two hundred degrees. I sipped on the smooth, nutty tea as I reached into the shopping bag and pulled out one origami envelope after another. They mingled there in my halo of lamp-light—the familiar taste of her tea, the familiar handwriting, the foreign ideas that seemed unlike my mother, except for the fact that each little packet was written like a top-ten list.

7. Memories

Some of the envelopes held collections of memories. The Ten Best Sunsets—I remembered that time at the lake where the sunset had been just as spectacular as the fireworks that followed, Randi and I under the big blanket, Mom and Dad joining in as the breeze skipped over the moon-chilled lake. Or in Things I Miss, I suddenly remembered the way Dad would laugh, cackle really, until it sounded like a dry cough.

Then there were the memories we had never shared. Hateful Things described the choir teacher who told second-grade Jean that she sang off-key and to sing more quietly. People Who Shaped Me described Patricia, who took her shopping for heels one lunch break. 

It wasn’t just Patricia. So many envelopes contained names I didn’t recognize. Mom had this whole life. I wondered if her right hand knew what her left was doing. I wondered if Dad and Patricia had ever met. I wondered who people like Lou and Bobby were. She never talked about any of them.

8. Regrets

The thickest envelope contained Things I Wish I Had Said. I took in the winding pen marks, some blue, some black, paragraphs crossed out, margins annotated, painstakingly wrought—hard to say, hard to write.

I sat with lukewarm tea in the asparagus cup and read all about the things my mother could not say.

1.How did you do that? It’s what I should have asked when Herb figured out how to program the VCR, when Jill came out with that picture-perfect bouquet, when the girls came home with laptop computers. I wasn’t taught to learn new tricks, and it’s embarrassing to ask. Still, I think of everything I could have learned, could have been able to do for myself. I wish I were better at asking.

2. Whatever. I hear kids these days say it. What I hear is “I don’t care. I’m rubber, you’re glue.” But I always cared. I was always glue, and so I was always scared.

3. No. I wasted a lot of time myself saying yes. Organizing this banquet or that. Before that there was Bobby, in the back seat of his car. I wanted to say no, but my voice froze. I wanted to tell the girls it’s ok to say no, but I couldn’t say no and interrupt the stream of cartoons. It’s rude to interrupt.

4. Enough. It’s like no. I’m drowning, but I can’t say I’ve had enough water. I’m outgrowing my pants, but I can’t say enough butter cookies. I couldn’t tell Herb “Enough golf already. Stay with us. I want to be enough.”

5. I was wrong. Would it have changed anything? It could have softened hearts along the way, especially with Herb. Men are weak; they need to hear it  bad listeners, so they need to have it spelled out for them. It didn’t have to be so hard.

6. Will you go out with me? I’m sorry it wasn’t more common in my day. We girls had our chance one dance per year, and even then I couldn’t muster up the courage to ask out Howard or Lou. It’s not that I’m complaining about the way life turned out. Herb was lovely for as long as he lasted. I loved Herb. It’s not that I wish I’d ended up with either of them. I just think I might have been a more confident person overall if I could have gotten the hang of this one. I don’t know. Chicken or egg? If I’d practiced back then, maybe I would have asked Herb out after we were married—dinner and dancing. Lord knows it would have done us good. Maybe I would have been able to start something with Jim before he got sick. You never know until you ask. I should have done more asking.

7. Thank you. Thank you. I’m good at that formal thank-you card. Queen of it, in fact—the one who will sit next to you at a wedding shower or baby shower and write down all the gifts so you can say your proper thank-yous. But I can’t for the life of me just take a compliment. “You look nice today, Jean.” I’m much more likely to say “Oh, phooey, I need to lose five pounds,” than I am to say a simple thank you. I don’t mean to argue. I just wish I could believe a compliment.

8. Listen to me! Sometimes I know things in my bones, but I don’t insist. I should have insisted, like when Herb put all that money into the dot-com bubble, or when Alex married Paul. We’re all fine. She’s fine, but I wanted better for her than that. I tell myself I couldn’t have made a difference. Could I, if I was more honest and less judgemental?

9. I miss you. Being lonely is not anyone’s fault is not a personal shortcoming. Why is it so hard to admit to being lonely? I don’t want to be a burden on the girls. What’s Randi going to do, drop her life in Florida? Randi could call more. All it would take are three words. The simplest bridge to construct, but those words are like nails in my throat. I can say it to Herb, now that he’s gone, now that it’s too late. I should have said it before. I need to say it to Patricia. I need Patricia.

10. I love you THIS much. “I love you” was never hard, but it was cheap. Saying just how much was always the hard part. Where are the words? I’m not the best at finding words, but I know they’re out there. So much I get a lump in my throat like I’ve just swallowed a full moon? I’m not poetic like Alex or direct like Randi. So much that I leave you alone even when it hurts? So much I could stick you in a pie and eat you for lunch? I’m still looking for the words.

9. Shadows

Inside each of us is a forest. I always thought of my mom’s as a place where sunlight filtered through groves of white-trunked birches, casting a shadow of lace on the packed earth, maybe a place where animals could smile and talk. 

Maybe more accurately, her forest was an asparagus garden where thin, coiffed stalks blossomed into frilly fronds. 

In the fall, Mom’s asparagus garden grew into a loose, feathery hedge that completely hid the back fence until she trimmed it to the ground before winter to make way for spring’s tender shoots. Those, too, she would trim every day. Asparagus, it occurred to me, was a frequent act of negation, of being consumed. 

I had always judged my mom by her positive space alone. Most people do this with each other, I think. It’s easy to see the light fall on someone’s shoulders and attach in strands of auburn hair, shining like the silver filaments that would be her final destiny. It’s easy to confuse the light with the person, without noticing the shadow she casts. We see the shadow as something else, as part of the world, and not something that she brings to it.  

Mom was the president of the Garden Club. She knew that shadows can nurture, like the dirt she heaped over one corner of the asparagus garden. Her sweet white stalks never saw the sun. Sunday stalks, she called them, reserved for special dinners. Without sunlight, they never developed the bitter chlorophyll taste.

I always thought I became myself in opposition to my mother. My forest was denser and darker than hers, the paths more narrow, the brambles more snarled. Now I saw it was from her that I learned the art of cultivation.

10. Doubts

Not everything that grows in the shade is sweet. I didn’t want to let my secrets become my regrets. I wanted to be angry at her for being weak, but I found myself admiring her for knowing what she wanted, or at least putting in the work to figure it out.

I wanted to call Randi and say “You’ll never believe this…” I wanted to go into Matilda’s room and watch her sleep, arm limp over the edge of her bed, hair cascading like moss over her pillow. And Paul...I wasn’t sure what I wanted. I wanted to swallow the moon whole, but I had no appetite.

I wanted to be mad at Mom for what she’d written about Paul—about me and Paul—but somehow I was not surprised by it. She’d said as much in our afternoon teas without using those words. It rang through the choice morsels of gossip she shared: “Randi and Dave are redecorating their beach house. They’re making some driftwood sculpture. I’m glad they have something to pursue together…” Accusation always ran rampant in her negative space, between the lines.

I sipped my now-cold tea and wondered, were I to write such a list, which unspoken phrase would be at the top. With Paul, things hung in the balance between “I miss you” and “enough.” 

Mom spent her life wondering about her relationships and her place in them; she may have found out too late. I didn’t want to wait around. I wanted to know. That was the scent she left with me.