A natural day
July 17th
Lightning. A brilliant electrical display across the southern sky over the Gulf of Mexico does not signify weather here. Even as I watch, in fact, it moves rapidly eastward, and there’ll be no puddles or hint of dampness on the streets in a couple of hours as I drive to Cove School to meet Robert for our Friday walk.
Four years ago this morning was Sunday. Life and death are in control, we are not. In my mind is a drizzly morning as I back my car out the carport, stopped by Linda banging on the door. I roll down the window. “Community called,” she said. “Your mother just died.” So instead of to church, I drove there to say goodbye. Said the prayers, removed her wedding ring for Susanna. “You must be her Bubba,” the nurses aide said.
I sat and waited. Tried a few phone calls. Talked to mama a few times. It was still lightly raining an hour or so later outside by the hearse as I pushed back the covering from her face, made the sign of the Cross on her forehead and said the commendation.
If she is 99 and you 75, the day your mother dies is the most natural day under the sun. It stuns all the same. And all those memories pouring out of your brain.
“Your mother cried all the way home,” my father wrote me when they arrived back in Panama City from Gainesville, after dropping me at North Hall on the UF campus on my 18th birthday.
“How old are you, Mommy?” I asked her from the back seat of our 1935 Chevrolet as we drove around Massalina and up Allen Avenue headed toward Tarpon Dock Bridge. “I’m 29.”
All dirt roads in 1941, of course, but that's still where Massalina Drive forks into Linda Avenue on the left and Allen Avenue on the right.
Too distant for me to hear any sound of thunder, the lightning has moved on east toward Apalachicola.
Too distant for me to hear any sound of thunder, the lightning has moved on east toward Apalachicola.
