"The Epistle of Helena"

I am the keeper of my mother's words.

Along with the wooden darning ball and the potato salad bowl, her letters, columns, diaries and trip logs are my inheritance.

She wrote every day, more than I knew.  I knew about cards to relatives and friends.  I knew about letters to the editor that made us cringe.  I knew about her love for postcards of jackalopes and giant ears of corn.  I thought I had seen all of what she wrote.

Her letters were cheery and her writing full of flowery romantic prose.  Not lovey-dovey romantic, but that optimistic bright-eyed Pollyanna-type of writing that must have made her California life seem all milk and honey to my Midwestern relatives. 

Their letters, especially those from North Dakota, were full of woe and lament, Job-like tales of illnesses, plagues, crop failures, infidelities, and way-too-early deaths.  My mother and sister and I sat once with Aunt Alice as she related the misery of neighbors.  It was a half hour before we realized she was talking about her soap opera characters.  The lines blurred in the whistling wind that rattled dust through the windows and made me want to steal the car keys and get my self out of there. 

So my mother's life was a contrast right out of the Grapes of Wrath.  South Pasadena, Santa Paula - - warm names full of sunshine and oranges.  She wrote to Alice and others of our days at the beach, picnics, swimming, gardening.  "All of it was true, some of it actually happened", my spiritual director says.  But there were other chapters I read only after her death, and some of it still waits.  Seven years on, I am just starting to dip into the notebooks lined up on my book shelf. 

My first inkling of her other writing were diary entries made as a young teacher in Antelope Valley, a wilderness at the time.  I was surprised to find not an excited young professional at the beginning of a career, but a woman 24 years old and depressed.  What self-imposed exile took a debutante in her red roadster out to the hinterland, away from the active social life to which she was accustomed?  What was she seeking out in that desert? 

One early piece begins, "Imagination is a tragic thing."  She fed us huge dollops of imagination, yet here I find that she viewed it as something sinister and to be controlled.   Her depressive side showed up in her interior but not her exterior life for the next 70 years .  She wrote of lost expectations, bitterness, spiritual questions and longings.  I wish we could have spoken of these, she and I, perhaps to ease them, knowing they were shared by someone we loved.

Our mothers are much more complex than we can know in this life.  That boxed-in role has changed in past decades, but to those of us who came from them, "Mother" is still a particular person and place.  Yet they were persons in their own right long before they ever got involved with us. 

My mother asked the questions we all asked as angst-ridden teens and young adults (or still do):  "Who am I?  Why am I here?  What is my purpose?  What's it all about?"  This from a parent who tutored me in the cut-and-dried answers of the Baltimore Catechism.  It's sad to think of the doubt that still haunted her in her last years.

Yet what lives is her writing that went out to the world:  "My gardening grandmothers said that friendship is the perfume entwined in our memories.  The main part of me always wants to plant many things, as I know the harvest will be beyond my wildest dreams."  She gardened, and wrote, and made friends like that - with lavish abandon.  Every year I plant, hopeful that things will grow.  Some do, but not as wildly or prolifically as for my mother.  But I am always encouraged by her example, her words, her hope.  So it is with writing, also.

And so, she wrote to the churches of California and Iowa and North Dakota, to the house churches in Ventura, Los Angeles, Oakdale, Sacramento, Mt. Pleasant, Dove Canyon, and Santa Paula, to school children and to strangers.  She wrote with news and needs and instructions and hopes for us, our families, and our futures.

Each year she planted, hopeful that something would grow.

Each day she wrote, hopeful that it would mean something to someone.

It did.

It does.

This article was first published in Iowa Connections May 2009:
www.iowaepiscopal.org/news_and_events/iowa_connections.php