Patience

On the lovely walk to Moe pond there were loads of violets along the path.  And then a little flower I didn’t know – more magenta than purple. My handy app identified it as fringed polygala, a type of milkwort.  So easy – just snap a picture and the app reports back nearly instantly.  I think of my Mom and her grand collection of botanical guides.  I can see her at the long table in Amenia late at night, after we were all in bed, sitting under the gas lamps, pouring over her books, patiently keying some new plant she had found in the woods.  I’d come out on my way to the bathroom and find her there, in her own quiet world, an introvert’s delight.

Mom was an amateur naturalist across many disciplines.  She called herself an ornithpectator, and she knew plants, amphibians, reptiles, trees, rocks, and the stars in the beautiful dark Amenia sky.  She was a wonderful teacher, and now, of course, I wish I had been a better student.  I wish I’d paid more attention and had more patience.  My brother-in-law Peter was one of her best students, especially when it came to birds.  She taught so many of us to look, to listen, to do the research, to remember.

Patience.  I did have patience for my mom’s mom, a fabulous seamstress.  Goldie made her living sewing piecework in a not completely horrible sweatshop.  She was a proud member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and had been busted on a picket line back in the day.  She loved to sew, and I can see and feel skirts and dresses she made for me.  I was the only one of us girls who had the patience to stand for fittings, listening to her complaints.  Perhaps I was also the only one who preferred unique hand sewn clothes to store bought.  Goldie was a gloomy person much of the time. But I think that even as a child I understood that she was lonely, and that sewing was an important self expression for her and a way to feel needed.  The last thing she made for me was a fabulous floor length, chocolate colored, velvet evening gown. It was fully lined, made from a pattern she cut from an old sheet based on an idea I got from a dream.  I wore it to a posh New Years Eve party in my sophomore year and I felt like a total princess.

Goldie died when I was pregnant with Liz, but she had lived to see her first great grandchild, Shayne’s daughter Cadhla. I think of the journey and span of her life, from a little town in Poland where radio was the big breakthrough, to Mamaroneck and men walking on the moon. I suppose Asher and Rowan will think of the span of my life, from paper and pencil, from books for identifying flowers, from a pay phone out on the landing, to whatever AI will bring us while I’m still around. One sixteenth of their DNA comes from Goldie, a small contribution, but there it is, something of her still alive in them, mixed with new and varied sources. Goldie’s gene pool was bounded by the walls of Ashkenazi Jews, as was my mother’s but my daughter’s was not, and her sons come from an even wider pool. We look backwards and forwards in time, waiting for what comes next, not always patiently. What comes next here on Averill Road is spring, with fringed polygala, with a new brood of goslings swimming between their parents on Moe pond. It’s a joy.