Happy Mother's Day, Mama

Dorothy Herron circa 1945

A golden glow swept  through the morning sky this morning. It streamed in through the east-facing windows like a search light scanning the floors and furniture. Outside, it shone through a curtain of softly falling raindrops. I could see the rain but not hear it. Normally, it's loud, you hear it first.

It was an appropriate start for Mother's Day in America. At least that is how it unfolded for me.  I wished my mother were here so that I could present her with a lei made of fresh flowers, kiss her and tell her, thank you, Mama. That's what I called her when I was young.

There are still so many things I'd like to ask her. Little things. Like, how old were you when you left Montana to come to California? What was that like? I know it was in the '30s when she arrived and took a nursing position at Providence Hospital in Oakland.

Born on January 1, 1912 and raised on the eastern plains of Montana, she was the eighth of nine children who survived. Seven brothers preceded her and one sister who died shortly after birth.

She told me stories about her mother who did all the cooking and washing in a small house with a coal-fired stove on an earthen floor. The brothers wore a lot of clothes, not only because of the severely cold winters, but because folks dressed up then. There's a photograph of her seven brothers wearing their caps, jackets, scarves, trousers and shoes, all standing like pickets on a fence. Each with a separate, discerning personality.

"There's Bill, he was the athlete and such a good dancer."

"That's Carroll." He looked to me like an impish leprechaun. "He played the piano."

"There's Father Ronald." The seventh son, Ronald became a Jesuit priest. He was the acclaimed star of the family.

George, Jack, Francis and Edwin, who would become a published writer and live a Bohemian-style life as a painter, rounded out the boys. Cecilia was the youngest.

They were an Irish Catholic family. My mother attended a Catholic elementary school, St. Jude, in their small, raucous hometown of Havre where her father ranched and served as sheriff.

I loved her stories. She would recall the warm Chinook winds that blew down from Canada during frigid winters.

She told how sometimes the laundry would freeze on the clothes line.

"I don't know how my mother did it. Such a hard life."

It's not surprising that she would go to nursing school and become a working woman herself, a bread winner.

She never dawdled. She baked fabulous cakes and pies. Her box of recipes is a family treasure. She moved hastily, a fast walker. My father could hardly keep up with her. When she gave people shots with a needle, she would pinch the flesh of their arm and practically throw the sharp needle into it.

She read books and magazines with vigor. There was always an open book laying on a nearby table.

She demonstrated psychic powers. In a dream she confided to me one morning, she heard of the death of her brother Ronald. We learned later that he died of heart failure in his room in Portland.

Perhaps because of her seven brothers, she raised me with an attitude of "boys will be boys." Not wanting to disappoint her, I stayed out of serious trouble.

She possessed old school toughness. She took on the scary foe of cancer in her 40s hardly skipping a beat.

She was mother to two children, my sister Mary, whom we called Mimi, and me. She is two years younger.  She was happily married to the same man, my father Frank Samson, for 62 years.

During her final days, I would visit her, her mind still as sharp as the proverbial tack. She could look right through me.

Her high school yearbook was close to her bed. I had never seen it before. I would page through her yearbook, point to someone and say, "Mom, do you remember her?"

"Oh yes," she answered.

"What about him?" I pronounced his name. She couldn't see the photo.

"Of course."

At 95, my mother's body, not her mind, finally failed her. She sat up in her bed, reached for her shoes and said it was time to go.

She died four days after my 60th birthday. I had been out of town. She waited so we could see each other one last time.

Thanks, Mama. You were the best. I love you.