This is the hour of lead

"Only white roses on my grave!" she used to say. Although this is not her grave, it's the closest I can get to it here. It's a special "Korean shrine" I created for her so I can visit, like Cinderella. To ask. To say things. Sometimes to weep.

Language fails me; five years have passed. Life has been very different.

My home is now wherever I drop my suitcase. No place is a true home, her home which was also mine for about two decades. How can any place ever be like hers? Without all that was so proudly hers? She was a working woman but deep down she was a Martha Stewart wannebee. Why else would she bleach and starch and iron her bedsheets to blindingly perfect stiff whiteness; why else would she get up early each Saturday to make her winter famiily breakfast special -baked potato halves served with cottage cheese, sour cream, fried bacon and fresh bread; why else would she spent half a day on Sunday happily cooking a great Sunday feast; why would she bake 12 types of complicated Christmas cookies; why would she slave away in her garden, vegetables in the backyard, flowers in the frontyard.

Now I think I understand why she - on top of her full time accounting job- spent her life slaving away in her house, her cottage, her garden, with her flower pots, at her stove. Now that I know it, I don't resent anymore being her unwilling assitant. I wish I could tell her that I finally get it. My mother grew up in the hungry pre-war, war and post-war years. She was simply creating the home that must have dreamt about as a poor little immigrant girl. What stories she must have had! What pain she must have burried deep inside her.

I got to hear only a fraction of her story and most of it on one starry breazy night at our cottage. This was the summer before she died, the last summer we, my older brother and I, would see her alive.

My brother and I were both visiting. We are talkers able to spend hours in idle mouthmotoring. It was late. Everyone else was sleaping, only he and I were still sitting on the terrace, drinking beer and enjoying the night. The air smelled of salt, algae, pine, pungent Mediterranean herbs.

We had the lights out to get the full impact of stars and the moon.

Well after midnight mom appeared in her favourite, old-fashioned lacey white nightgown, looking like a ghost with wild hair. Even in the hottest of nights she couldn't sleep in sleeveless nightgowns claiming that her arms felt freezing cold. I used to tease her about it, but now, I am like that! My mother's daughter. Also, just like her, I can't stand anything tight around my neck, no scarves, not heavy necklasses, no turtlenecks. I feel like I am chocking - and I used to laugh at this, too.

She sat down with us - and our little pow wow lasted until dawn. I heard for the first time that she had almost been given up for adoption when they first settled into their new environment. It was her hysterical crying and kicking that broke her father's heart and made him say that if they were to die of hunger they would die together.

I heard about little gifts my grandfather - a renowned carpenter in their knack of the woods - would bring his three girls from the trips he took. She told us about a silk scarf, 'the most beautiful thing she had ever owned" forcefullly snatched from around her neck by some nasty soldiers who added it to the pyre where everything else from their house had already been disappearing in flames, right before their own eyes and right before they were forced to leave their home town and embark on a months- long, 350km march. Incidentally, on this same trip was my paternal grandmother and her brood of six young children, three of whom did not survive the journey. The two families, not knowing that one day their kids would be united in marriage, shared a raw pumpkin because there was nothing else ther to eat.

All these memories were swarming in me like bees on Prosac as I was walking around my mom's designated Korean 'shrine.' I was also thinking how, as years pass, I feel evermore grateful for bits and pieces of memory about my mother that come to me. At the same time I am growing more regretful about not getting to know this mysterious, brave, complex person who was my mother. Just when I realized that she was a person first and my mother second, that's when she died. Now I think, we could have been great friends. We were treading on this path, more and more decisevely and bravely. Alas, death doesn't really care about family reconciliations. It takes whatever it wants whenever it wants.

Many times, thinking of her, I am in the 'hour of lead.'

This is the Hour of Lead--

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons recollect the Snow--

First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go--

(this, of course, by E. Dickinson)

I borrow again someone else's words, no idea whose.

So much beauty have I seen on earth,

So much to marvel over and admire;

Yet each new sight but bred a new desire

To stray still farther from the quiet hearth.

*******

Now am I stirred with mightier unrest

For longer journeys than old I knew.

I would set forth upon that final quest

That Large Adventure which has come to you.

Somewhere you wait to show new worlds to me.

Pilot! draw anchor! let my soul go free!

( hope the above is not copyrighted)