For many of us, our mothers were our first caregivers. I speak to mine at least once a week and feel lucky to have the chance. Here is a very short story about one encounter that was, for me, particularly sacred.

Under the Water  

  The backyard doesn't need watering. I water it, uncoiling the hose and snaking it toward the base of the giant willow oak whose torso still weeps from earlier rain.
            I phone my 96-year old mother (above, with me and my older sister Ann in 1944.) She lives in Ohio. As always, her voice smiles as she describes the three ducks pedaling across the pond four stories below.
            My oak leaf hydrangea is not thirsty. Neither is the boxwood nor the new purple flowers that lack a name I know. I spray them, the hose in my right hand, the phone in my left.
            "What are you doing today, Chip?" she asks, calling me by the nickname my father gave me because of my odd first name. "Are you playing golf?"
            I'm not, but I tell her I am because this makes her even happier.
            The magnolia, especially the sweet bay, has noticed the end of spring. Blooms brown at the edges.
            I tell Mom stories about two of her great grand children. She laughs.
            "What are you doing today, Chip?" she asks. "Playing a little golf?
            "Yep," I say. "My regular tee-time is 12:45…the usual foursome." I've only played golf twice in two years. I have no foursome. I am not playing today.
            I notice four rows of white-faced begonias smiling satisfied as ladies at tea. I water them.
            Mom reports that there are eight blooms on the orchid in her living room. "They don't need much water," she says. 
            I think about watering them.
            "What are you doing today, Chip?"
            "I'm going deer-hunting, Mom. I'll be taking Dad's 20-gauge with me."
            "Oh, that's nice," she says. "Be careful."
            I haven't been hunting since I was twelve. I killed a rabbit that day with a .410 gauge shotgun. After I watched him squirm toward death, I never hunted another animal.
            The morning sun doesn't need me, but winter has bleached my skin. I take off my shirt. Maybe the sun will burn away my dark.

“What are you doing today, Chip?”

Mom has listened to classical music almost every day of her life. “I think we’re going to the orchestra,” I tell her. “They’ll be playing Brahms 2^nd Symphony.”

“Wonderful,” she exclaims. “Let’s see…” She begins to hum. I hear her thin voice searching the sagging shelves of her memory for the melody. For a moment, I can’t recall it either. Finally, she pours forth the first four notes. I scoop up the rest and hum them back to the woman who first taught them to me.

“Great,” I tell her. “You remember it so well.”

In the half-note rest that follows, Mom starts her personal refrain, "So…what are you…” Before she can finish, I interrupt the woman who was my first caregiver.

"Mom, do you ever feel sad?”
            "No," she says. In more than sixty years, I've only seen her cry three times, never for long. Her sense of grace will not permit it.
            "I feel sad," I told my mother.
            "What happened?" she asks.
            "Nothing."
            "Well, you just have to put one foot in front of the other," she says.
            I watch as water from the garden hose chandeliers the emerald points of the evergreen.
            "So what are you and your lovely wife doing today?" 
            "I don't know," I say.
            Tears born in my throat reach my face. Mom is too far away to dry them as she once did. I say goodbye.

Mom tells me to have a nice day and that she loves me. I tell her the same, hang up the phone, walk toward my house, one foot in front of the other.

-Erie Chapman