I will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land (Gen. 28:15)

I press my lips to her cheekbone.  Much of her face is sunken in, but I love what remains.  If thoughts are prayers, I pray that this is not the last time.  We go through our anxious exchange that’s become routine, “I love you.”  “I love you.”  “Thank you so much for everything.”  “Thank you, too.”  It’s hard to distinguish whose is the initiating voice in this call and response that is like a liturgy or a song.  “Now what are you going to do as soon as you get home?”  “I promise that I will call.”  “Good.”  I smile and wave as I walk through the door, turning back again and again.  There is a character in mythology—a poet named Orpheus—who lost his beloved to death forever just because he looked back, clinging to the sight of his wife reclaimed from the underworld, in a show of love.  Just as I’m out of sight, the call comes, “Mary Jo?”  I rush back—“Here I am!”—only to hear one more question, “did you lock the house?” 

I know I’ll miss even what I’ve come to think of as anxiety when I don’t hear her call anymore.  I wish she would ask me something significant, something important, “leave your husband and daughter and take care of me.”  “Take your profession—all your class notes and published essays—and burn them atop a mountain that I will show you.”  I need something with a biblical charge to show my love, but maybe covenant exists in the more mundane calls I receive and the reassurance I can give here on this bank and shoal of time.

My small family of three (Paul, Katya, and I) sat with her table-mates at the Home of the Good Shepherd—Nancy, May, and Flo—as they poked around the edges of their plates.  My mother didn’t touch her food which will quickly be taken as “failure to thrive” in the place she calls prison.  Paul breaks the silence, “Do the residents still have homes?  Do they talk about their lives before they came here?”  Flo, who is part Welsh and part Italian, is quick to answer, “No, that’s private, and to ask about it would be considered probing.”  Later in the car, I remind Paul that Mom says most lunches pass in silence, and he wonders aloud again whether it’s because there is shame in being consigned to this waiting room, which will be for many, their last on earth.  “I’m getting a mental hospital vibe,” said Katya when she walked, for the first time, down the corridor to Room 106, past the faux painting of two running horses, which strikes me as a mockery of those residents who are not asleep in their wheelchairs but can only self-propel with small movements of their feet, slowly, slowly.

Paul pulls the car under the carport, and I wheel her to the spot where she can stand to grasp the door handle and pull herself up, swivel around, and lift her legs into the car.  “There.  Now, where are my cigarettes?”  I place the pack of Kools in her hand, “Oh, thank God.”  Her cigarette lit, she inquires, “where to now?”, and we tell her that Paul wants to drive east along the river looking for a cemetery in the woods somewhere outside of Stillwater.  In rain turning to snow we glide, skirting the edge of the Hudson with hills covered in brown furze like an animal hide running out in undulating strides on either side.  There is a gentleness to this landscape that has been farmed since the late eighteenth century as the stones in the graveyard indicate, and part of the gentleness lies in the easy way you can cross and recross the wide river, and find, if not quite the same, a similar world on either side.  The big comparisons and allegories form in my head, but I keep them to myself.  What Mom verbalizes between courteously spaced cigarettes (so Katya doesn’t start complaining about her lungs looking like walnuts from second-hand smoke) are memories:  being lost out in this country when she and Jenny went to get apples, buying the railroad carriage lamp in the Greenwich hardware store.  I listen and keep looking at the horses standing in the sleet on the sides of hills quiet as candles.  A group of them around a trough of some kind (but not eating) regard us seriously.  “Mom,” I venture, “don’t horses want to get out of the rain?”  “No.  I don’t think it bothers them.”  We round a bend, and I see one—it must be a young one—in what I imagine to be a burst of excitement gallop up a hill, its roan rump working hard and blond mane flying.  She remembers the summer she went out to Colorado to take college courses and to ride horses (even though she’d grown up on a farm).  She remembers taking care of the horse she was assigned.  “What was its name, Mom?”  “Always.”  As if my imagination were godlike, I’d give her a new horse—let’s call him Secretariat—when he lived he won the triple-crown and she took her four little kids down to Saratoga to watch him work out, teaching us to love his combination of grace and power.  I see her on some such horse—Secretariat, Goldie, or Always—outpacing death, and fording in an easy leap the rocky stream that prevents our red SUV from going any further down the road behind a muddy farm.  “I wanna go home,” my daughter whines, “we’re out in the middle of scenic nowhere and we’ve been driving for three hours.”  She quiets after a quick stop at the Stewart’s gas station and store in Greenwich where we pee and pick up a warm container of mac n’ cheese for Katya and a cup of black coffee for Mom, who has lit up again and blowing smoke out the two-inch crack in the window. 

Car rides always were the place where I felt most at home with my mother, coming at things obliquely—horses, cows, and all kinds of curious creatures—without the stress of eyes meeting and needing the response of eyes.  On our car ride today, just like the thousands I’ve taken with her over the course of our shared life, the landscape rolled out behind and before us—the world opened up and we looked forward to what is around the next bend.  “Oh my goodness,” she says, as we approach the store that sells wood stoves in East Argyle, “that’s where we took pictures of those animals.”  The big brown cows basking in the warm sun of late February.  She remembers the cows although I'd bet dollars to donuts she doesn't remember me.  But I don’t need recognition and am not ashamed of my nothingness.  My hands were on her shoulders in the sunlight, and that is all that matters.  Wherever you go I will go.  I promised.  “Do you fear what’s to come after death,” a bold interviewer asked the intrepid traveler, Freya Stark.  “What’s to fear?  It’s just another journey.”  And while I would never say this aloud to my mother, one day along a road she’ll have to go alone, I know a barn door will open and the voice of He who knows the mountain goats’ birthtime, who opens the storehouses of snow in April to make “poor man’s fertilizer” will call, “Midge,” and she’ll go home to work right alongside Him as she did with Grampy.  For the time being, home is a Subaru Forester as cozy as the train car that rocked lazily from side to side as it inched across the Kazakh steppe, and I ate chocolate with Katya and drank cognac with Paul.  As cozy as the train car Mom remembers, filled with music, when Isaac Stern en route to a performance in St. Louis, invited Mom, her mother, and her cousin Mildred into his compartment to listen to him play his violin.

On a drive with Mom the last day of February.  Cows in East Argyle.

We stopped in this cemetery in the middle of farm fields.  It was snowing on April 3.

Latest ebay find:  Secretariat working out at Saratoga c. 1972.  It might have been the same summer I remember the long-legged chestnut beauty being led off the dirt track.  I remember my mother's awe.

Still wild, still natural.  Secretariat with his trainer.