Mom talked to me today.

I know, she’s dead.

The empty chair in the kitchen reminds me.

Today when my arthri­tis got the bet­ter of me, I began to despair of ever hav­ing a nor­mal day, a reg­u­lar day with­out the req­ui­site two hours of wak­ing up my bones. Lum­bar fusion with screws and rods over 20 years ago — my spine began rebelling a few months ago.

Then today, I heard from Mom. She told me take care of your­self the way you took care of me.

I can’t begin to describe how this made me feel.

S0, for the first time in over a year and a half, I reached for the egg poacher and used it. Toasted an Eng­lish muf­fin, cracked open a new jar of orange mar­malade, and spooned a gen­er­ous por­tion gra­nola on top of a cup of straw­berry yogurt — then I set the table with her Spode china, folded a linen nap­kin, got out match­ing sil­ver­ware and placed the lat­est copy of The Nation to the right of the place set­ting. “Thanks, Mom,” I said out loud and began to eat my lunch.

My father taught me some won­der­ful things. Break­fast, his favorite meal, required care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion by the diner. For exam­ple: how to but­ter toast. He told me to put 4 small pats of but­ter on one piece of toasted bread, then place another piece of warm toast on top and but­ter it and then lift it and the but­ter on the bot­tom slice will be soft and will spread eas­ily. I know how to eat a soft boiled egg by tap­ping the side and slic­ing the top off the shell, how to care­fully hold the eggcup that once belonged to my grandmother.

My Mom taught me what goes in the dish­washer and what must be hand-​washed. The Bavar­ian crys­tal gob­lets, the bone china, sil­ver knives because the heat could melt or weaken the sol­der, any­thing with gold fil­i­gree and the lead crys­tal bowls. When her dish­washer died, she told me she was secretly glad because the machine broke things on pur­pose. She wouldn’t let Daddy put in a new one, she stored pot­ting soil and ter­ra­cotta pots in it.

We had a bird feeder hang­ing in front of the kitchen win­dow. Our house was built on an incline, so the win­dow was fairly high. A deter­mined squir­rel would hang upside down on the feeder and eat sun­flower seeds. My Mom thought the squir­rel needed some help, so she hung an oys­ter fork with a piece of gros­grain rib­bon next to the bird feeder.

I’d heard sto­ries my whole life about my great-​grandfather who had blue eyes and long white hair. He was blind from cataracts, this was around 1910 or ear­lier, before surgery. My Mom told me her brother, my Uncle Floyd, said Grand­fa­ther Boyer would whit­tle tiny wooden seats for fairy swings which he’d attach to the branches of low hang­ing bushes with silk thread. My great-​grandfather came to Amer­ica from Bavaria and we have his US cit­i­zen­ship papers. He had to for­swear any alle­giance to the King of Bavaria. His wife, named Kather­ine, seemed humor­less and mean, Uncle Floyd said. I have sto­ries about her — she had to take the horse and wagon in to Cincin­nati to Pearl St. Mar­ket, alone, just after the Civil War, to sell the vegetables.

It soothes me to remem­ber these peo­ple. I pol­ish their mem­o­ries with care. Thoughts of their lives seem to con­trol my artis­tic delib­er­a­tion and help me to con­tain my grief. The muse of lost peo­ple — an energy source.

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