Letters From My Mother

52 the minnesota review Katharyn Machan Aal Letters From My Mother 1 When they forced you out of work in January, you cried and wrote to me that now your days would have to fill with birds growing fat on sunflower seeds and the sound the telephone doesn't make blurrring with dust through home hours. You're sixty-eight. After seventeen years of using your brain and your time to make money for men who demanded devotion as due, you're done. Deadwood. Old and gray, the used-up mare trucked off with a shrug. Now you send letters on orange stationery, bitter moments, sweet tais from the past. I mount them in a dark album: DREAMS DONE DREAMT. And I write back to you: YES LOVE DOING This valentine is made of hard lace. "February and no snow. Roger says we'll have a drought this year." You used to talk about the groundhog, laugh about how the people in the office argued over its shadow. This year you worry about blood pressure, the purple marks that suddenly appear along your arms. You're looking for work, going to look for work in the Help Wanted ads. "Severance pay? Ha!" No pension, and Social Security stringing you along. My father died on Valentine's Day in 1966, when oil was a cost one hardly considered. "No snow, but it's cold." I search my pockets, take up knitting instead. 53 aal One blue day I get an envelope from you full of the sound of geese. I smile. But the stamp reeks of cigarette smoke and the address wavers with whiskey. How many hours do you swallow whole alone in the house while your son goes to work in the place where you got him a job? For that last year he was your boss, but he turned away when they said you could stay and type paychecks two days a week. Now he pays most of the rent, lets you keep cooking, cleaning, soothing. But he sucks cigars instead of talking. To him March is four brown weeks. None of this do you say to me; I know it without statements. How are you? Down in the corner, when the geese have gone, one word curled into a ball: crocus. A week before your birthday yo write to me again, longer, this time about a mouse, several mice, pattering through your rooms at night and waking my brother, enraging him. Unwinkingly the first ones stared at you as they hunched on the linoleum, black bead eyes bold with April hunger. My brother set traps; now each morning you find two small soft bodies crushed between steel and wood. You fling them into the weeds outside, pause to stare at the way the sun indifferently shortens their shadows. But there's one you'll never find, you tell me, one with a special grayness you've seen approach the traps with cunning and steal the cheese from the nether end. She'll survive, you say. And while my brother's out drinking or asleep you stay up nights reading the paper, waiting alert in a kitchen chair to watch her fine black whiskers quiver as she braves the light once more. ...