A Letter to My Mother

A Letter to My Mother

Dear Mom,

I know you’ve been gone a long time now, almost 15 years, but I dreamt I was with you again last night.

It was in the old house in Chicago, the one on Potomac Avenue, the first one I remember the number for.

You planted flowers there in the backyard where there had never been flowers, watered them with the water that fell from the sky. The flowers were so red and yellow and blue that you loved to just sit on the porch and watch them.

You washed my hair with that water too. You said it would keep me young and help me grow tall and smart and loving. I was too young to know what all those words really meant, but I believed you.

Autumn came finally, and the rain fell grayer and harder, and then there was snow, so much snow, and you put the snow in a dishpan and melted it and washed my hair with it.

You said the water from snow was just as pure as the water from the rain.

Years later in your last house in Arizona, the one I still remember the number for, I washed your hair with water from the sink.  You didn’t complain.  You understood.  You knew that there was no rain in the desert, no snow either.

While you waited for your hair to dry, you told me stories you never told me before.  You told me about your sister and the time she visited Lvov, the candy she found on the seat of the train, about your pet pig Carolina and how much you loved just sitting with her in the forest and watching the leaves fall in the coolness that followed those long summers. You told me about the war too, about the day the Germans came to your home in the forest west of Lvov and killed your mother and your sister and your sister’s baby.  You told me too that the German soldiers did other things that you still could not tell me about even though I was a grown man and a university professor.

I listened to your stories that I had never heard before and knew you like I had never known you, and when you asked me again where the water came from, I told you that I had collected it from the clouds.