Ronda Rich

Syndicated Columnist

The last few years of her life, Mama said, “This family’s really going to miss me when I’m gone. None of ‘uns have any ‘idee’ how much I do.”

When her refrain did not receive the appropriate sympathy, she forged on. “I mean it.” She’d pointed her crooked forefinger. “One or the other of you’s always wantin’ somethin’. When the Lord calls me home for the good rest I’ve earned, it’s gonna be a shock. I’m not sure y’all can carry on without me.”

She said this while hand hemming a dress for my sister. I was picking up my dachshund, which she babysat. As any respectful daughter would do, I shook my head, rolling my eyes.

Her brown eyes darkened with aggravation. “You just wait, young lady. You’ve got a lesson comin’. All of ‘uns do.”

Then she changed the subject.

“This dog is the smartest one in this whole family. When it’s time for you, I’ll say, ‘Dixie Dew, your mama’ll be home in no time a’tall.’

She’ll look up at me, jump down from this chair, then sit by the door to wait.’” Mama dropped the recliner’s footrest, then went into the kitchen. She returned with a bag of newspapers clippings. “Here’s your columns I’ve been cuttin’ out.”

Again, she shook her head. “You ain’t got no idea what a job this is.”

She sighed. “I shore don’t know who’ll do it when I’m gone.”

Months later, my sister and I looked at each other, sadly shaking our heads. “Mama was right,” she said. “We took for granted the load she helped us carry.”

I nodded. “Life was easier.”

What we didn’t know was that while she had given up the ghost a few weeks earlier, there were harder lessons still to come.

Standing in my foyer one Sunday after church, laughing at her own storytelling, her right hand flew to her forehead, she closed her eyes, then slumped with a thunderous thump to the floor, gone in the twinkling of an eye from a brain aneurysm.

Mama spent her life, helping anyone who needed a hand. She picked cotton and stripped cane stalks for syrup – a miserable job that shredded her hands – on the little farm where her family struggled as tenants.

Then she married, making an excellent wife and mother. Though the Southern summers were almost intolerably hot – once she was hospitalized with a heat stroke – she loved her vegetable gardens and many were the late July nights that she spent putting up tomato juice, okra (known as okrie by mountain folks) and freezing corn, which is nothing short of a mess. I scrubbed kernels from the cabinets while she used a butcher knife to scrape the cream from the cob.

When the blessings of my writing career began to fall gently like a light autumn rain, she was a phone call away when a last-minute speaking engagement sent me scurrying to the airport. She and Dixie Dew were ideal pals and a more dependable sitter has never been found. In the years since she died, I have gone through a dozen sitters, yet have never known the complete peace that Mama provided.

A while back, I found her cordless phone with an answering machine. Mama couldn’t use voice mail or call waiting. If it beeped with another call, she’d say, “I gotta go so whoever is callin’, can call back.”

I plugged in the answering machine. She had somehow managed to record a call with my nephew’s wife, Selena, who was asking if she could keep their toddler while she went to the doctor for a prenatal check-up.

“I’ll be glad to,” she chirped happily. “Just bring that sweet boy right on.”

I played it several times, tears sliding down my cheeks.

Mama was right. Life has been much harder for all of us since she slipped away to her eternal home.

Ronda Rich is the best selling author of the Stella Bankwell series.

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