“Mourning doesn’t come all at once,” I remind myself. I’ve been up and at it for a couple of hours. Had my coffee, made the beds, did the left over dishes, sorted through the mail. I am on my second load of laundry, sitting in front of the dryer folding.
I am pulling at a wet red and white doily reforming it into its proper form after it has been mistakenly washed in a load of jeans and work shirts. I sit there suddenly weeping at the loss of my mother and appreciating the nutcase I have become in her place.
“What colors do you like?” Mother asks. She was going wacko at Michael’s picking out yarn. She would buy more yarn skeins than she could possibly finish in her lifetime. “Everything MUST have a doily!” she issued her command imperiously.
She was not a great yarn worker, although both Gigi and Mimi had been accomplished at needle work, sewing, embroidery, crochet, and even some lace work. So, you might say that it was in the family. She enjoyed the repetition of the process, and the end result was a present she could give away.
Everyone in the family had a doily and more likely a stack of them, or in my case two drawers full. My sister has a banker’s box filled with just the ones she uses for Christmas: red, white, and green. She actually has enough doilies to construct a foot and a half tall Christmas tree centerpiece by stacking them in descending order of circumference.
Mother begins making doilies for every knick-knack I have in the house – every perfume bottle, every Netsuke, and Tchotchke gets a made-to-order doily in complimentary size and color. “I like green, blue, and purple,” I tell her. A couple of weeks later I receive a package filled with variegated green, blue, and purple doilies in various sizes… and a half a cup of glittery plastic confetti cows, moons, and stars which always end up embedded in my computer keyboard!
Mother makes doilies for the men too. They need one for their coffee cup, water bottle, tape dispenser, stapler, paper clip holder… “You have a brown candle here, so you need a brown and beige doily…” She was unstoppable. She even made doilies for the receptionist at her doctor’s office, the stewardess on the flight up to visit her grand-kids, and one for the maid at the hotel where she was staying on vacation.
I look around my house and realize how much crap I have collected that the Old Bag gave me. She loved catalog shopping!
- Three clocks that all work intermittently and are all set for different times. “You can never be late if you don’t know what time it is,” she says smiling broadly.
- Three egg timers: a chicken that crows, a cow that moos, and a snowman that rings…
- miniature tea sets in various colors and themes…
- a bunch of holiday stuffed animals – Valentine’s Day, Easter, Halloween, Christmas….
- Christmas was off the hook with both presents and decorations: a spitting laughing Santa, a glowing spinning snowman, psychedelic angels…
I set the red and white doily to dry flat on the counter. “Mourning doesn’t come all at once,” I remind myself again. I can’t seem to part with any of it.
(First published 4/21/13)
