Swite Swat Swoo

That came to be in some imagination play, isn't that strange? It sounds like the conjuring of an old elf :)

Once when I was 9 years old I ran over my mother's big toe with a sweeper. I did it on purpose and she had to go to the emergency room. It looked awful, swollen and black and blue. The toenail had to be removed and it swelled to the size of a small apricot. My sissy Cindy had just had a baby named Bryan and they came home to live with us for a little while. I was sooo jealous of him at the time. I don't even remember anything about those few days except being excited about his birth one day and announcing it to the neighborhood, and then loathing his existence the next, and then running my mom's toe over with the sweeper. They thought it was an accident, but it wasn't...

It's funny that I told her about that a few months before she died.

You know when I ran over your toe with the sweeper?

Yes.

I did it on purpose.

I expected her to ask me why, but nah.... she didn't. I was leaning on her shoulder, sitting on the couch in her little apartment and crying over a cut up measuring tape, sniffling and she just held me closer...

My son who was so little at the time and had taken her tiny sewing scissors and chopped her measuring tape to bits... The same tape she used to sew our clothes and now it was in pieces in my hands.

I laid against her for quite a long time and I said, "Now how am I supposed to measure my life..."

I still sort of feel like that with her gone.

I was at the park yesterday with the kids and had this overwhelming feeling to call her. There was a long time after she died and 4'oclock in the afternoon would come and go and she still hadn't called me and it was such a feeling of missing her, that phone call I expected from her, had had from her for so long. For months after her death my dreams brought to me images of her calling me... But yesterday came, and I haven't thought of that for years... But I felt the urge to dial the number I could not remember and I looked at the clock on my phone, and it was 4:00.

I have a picture in my mind of my mother at 40, the same year Bryan was born. My dad rented one of those horribly tacky advertising signs that has a lit up arrow and on it were the words "Lordy, Lordy Jeanne is Forty. HONK! " She is sitting astride the sign and is so pretty with this poodle we had on her lap, and her mutilated toe having healed weeks before, and ofcourse, forgotten. The neighborhood kids and I are running down the street yelling "Happy Birthday!" I screamed to the honking cars, "It's MY mom!" And someone yelled, "Who cares?" And I screamed louder, "I DO!!"

It was a happy time. It was about a year later I came home from school and she had overdosed on our living room floor. I shook her a minute and then went to the phone, I still remember the number I would call again and again over the next part of our life together, and they put me on hold....