"Your mother," she said laughing, fixing me with a questioning look that seemed to demand I be able to explain my mother's behavior, "didn't even stop giving her Home Demonstration Club program."
We stood outside our church in the mid 1980s. The cool, pleasant, spring air made people want to talk a while after services. Groups of ladies in skirts and blouses or dresses, stood in small clumps on the green grass of the lawn. Fran, standing in a group of ladies to our left, bent slightly at the waist, reached toward her knee and tugged at her pantyhose.
Men in sportcoats with open collars, some with buttoned collars and striped ties, stood laughing. A few of them held cigarettes, taking surreptitious puffs every now and then, careful to blow the smoke away from the circle of churchgoers.
Children ran up and down the covered walkways of the redbrick church, some of the girls in their skirts and blouses like their mothers. Others wore pants, but usually with a matched shirt. The boys were in their blue jeans and knit shirts. They ran down the long portico, turned east onto the concrete sidewalk, jumped off the three short steps that led toward more sidewalk, then continued running, making a sharp right back toward the church, and the ten or so groups of adults standing outside the big white double doors of the sanctuary. A string of ten-my two among them-passed by us in a blur of motion. One of the men finally yelled, "Hey, y'all slow down! You're going to hurt somebody!"
Alice was a longtime acquaintance of my mother, and made me aware of the friendship; I had never known Alice when I was small and we lived in Purdon. I had met her two years ago, when we began attending Northside Baptist. I was 25, she was probably 45 at the time of the conversation.
"Your brothers and sister, the three of them, Elton, Neila, and Stephen-I guess they were about 7, 6, and 2-had gotten into her sewing notions and each of them had three spools of thread. They had wrapped about a foot of thread from each spool onto their hands, and then they just started out running, letting the spools bounce and hit the linoleum floor behind them, unraveling them as they ran."
She looked down and shook her head as though seeing the picture anew and expressing her disbelief.
"They started out in your parents' bedroom where the sewing machine was, and then they ran through Neila's room, into the living room where we were all standing around card tables, listening to your mother explain how to use the small metal tool to make a pattern on the aluminum trays we were making, then on into the dining room, through the kitchen, onto the backporch, then back to your parents' bedroom where they started the second round.
"Your mother paid them no attention." I shifted my weight to my left foot. This might take a while.
"Acted like they weren't even there, doing anything. They weren't screaming, just running with those spools bouncing wildly behind them, wrapping the thread around everthing in their path. Finally, so much thread wrapped itself around the doorknob leading from the living room to the dining room that when they ran in there, it slammed the door shut. Everbody jumped. Opal let out a little scream, but your mother-- she didn't even flinch. I guess the kids knew the door slamming was gonna get her attention, so they stopped running and it got real quiet then."
Your mama said, "So that's the proper way to make a patterned aluminum tray. The meeting next week is at Eara's house, and we're going to be learning how to freeze fresh garden produce for use all year long."
I was searching Alice's face for any sign of judgment of my mother because I simply could not tolerate that. Changing the subject seemed out of the question as Alice got into the story. Unsure of what the summation would be, I waited, listening, thinking of my mother, how wonderful it was to grow up with her, how she knew when to call a halt and when to let things go.
How she was like a grown kid--fun but responsible. She remembered what it was like to be a kid, not like most grownups and parents who pretended they'd never done anything bad or had a bad thought. Most of them acted like kids were just some little aliens who showed up on their doorstep and operated by some foreign code they couldn't understand. Not my mother.
I knew her boundaries were wide as the Missouri and her tolerance as deep as the oil wells around Corsicana, but I didn't want anyone talking bad about her or inferring she didn't control her kids. I knew she wouldn't have let them run in anyone else's house, just her own. And she'd say, they weren't hurting anything, and they were just having fun, so why did she need to stop them?
"Let's go into the dining room now for refreshments. I made buttermilk poundcake and lemon meringue pie. Hope ya'll like it!" Alice continued with the story, mimicking my mother's voice, her dreamy gaze indicating her own thoughts had transported her back to that day.
"Well, we all went into the dining room after your mother got some scissors and cut the thread off the doorknob so we could open the door, and there under the table were your brothers and your sister, scrunched up like we couldn't see 'em." She giggled at the memory.
"Your mother got hold of them firmly, each one by the arm, and pulled them from under the table."
"'Go on now,' she said, and they did, running out the back door, one, two, three. She never made any excuses for them, just laughed and said 'the natives are restless'and started cutting cake and pie, pouring iced tea for everyone."
"Some of us wanted to say something, but we didn't say one thing as we left later, and we didn't gossip about it to each other. All of us loved your mother. And I guess we just wouldn't criticize her like we would anyone else. Truth is, most of us wished we had her calm, 'cause my kids got on my nerves. She acted like it was the most natural thing in the world, them running through the house trailing that thread."
She looked at me again, searching my face as though I shared the same memory. "I wasn't born then," I said, almost as an apology.
"Well, I've got to go. Robert's waiting for me," she said moving away toward the Oldsmobile 88 where her husband waited. "I'll never forget that-- never," she said more to herself than me as she walked away, slowly shaking her head of tightly permed silver hair.
I walked briskly toward the car, where my husband waited, glad that Alice had not been there the day that Elton had rappelled from the roof on a rough rope anchored to the television antenna, crashing into the wall of the living room, full of yet another group of women attending one of mother's ladies' meetings.
And I know she wasn't there the night my brother Stephen, a teenager by then, walked through the house with a friend and two huge owls they had caught, or the day he parachuted off the house, or set the pasture with the butane tank on it on fire. All in all, the thread event seemed tame compared to some of the events that happened at our home later.
"Did your mother ever let you...?" I started, then stopped seeing the look on my husband's face.
"No!" he said, then laughed, having previously heard about my mother's tolerance for childish activities. "I'm sure she didn't."
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