As a kid, Mother’s Day more resembled a family reunion than a one-person honorific, as the house would be jammed with grandmothers and aunts and their various clan attendants.  Blessed with two full sets of grandparents in my youth, all holidays would have seemed incomplete without high-decibel conversations and hot and cold running food at the big table.

 

It took me a while to understand why my Mom was not as thrilled as the other “older women” at the approach of her special day. I finally realized that the other parental siblings had long skedaddled, too far to justify a trip home, leaving Mammy pretty much holding the baby when it came to celebrating her “special day” with the other family mothers.

 

I can remember her so clearly now, tap dancing at hyper speed in her own kitchen as she warded off advice and helpful grandmotherly hands during the preparation of the Mother’s Day dinner for many of my growing up years. Yooper women are nothing if not stoic, and being of full Finnish descent, she had that trait in spades. And a little “cooking wine” never hurt.

 

But attrition attends on the Great White North as well, and as the years passed, fewer places were set at the big table, until finally it was just us, that is, She Who Must Be Obeyed and I, and our respective parents. A six-place dinner was plain sailing in contrast with what had gone before, with us “youngsters” tasked with some of the cooking and all of the clean-up in both households, which alternated the holiday each year.  It was a genuine joy to hear both of those ladies chatting away in the living room, listening to the joyous clink and clank of somebody else doing the dishes as the old fellows enjoyed a ball game and a barley pop or two in front of the television.

 

When I was away at school, it was sometimes easy to forget the significance the holiday retained back at home, as a callow student could be swayed from his family responsibilities by a Sunday afternoon kegger over at the Sig Tau house, or some such frivolity in his long journey through the halls of academia. The Old Man, however, could be relied upon to make that special call, usually on Wednesday night; reminding me that things might not go well on my next home visit should I neglect my filial duty.  With that, I never missed the chance to provide some hapless florist with the opportunity of attempting to unravel the Byzantine network of the township road system to deliver my annual floral tribute. Thanks, Pop.

 

And as a younger kid, I recall going out with the Old Man to find just that right card to go along with that Whitman’s Sampler that was the mainstay of his Mother’s Day gifting strategy. Like most of his mates in the GWN, he eschewed the idea of floral deliveries, in that cut flowers had a limited life expectancy, and were also inedible. Mom agreed.

 

For a long time I just pretended that Mother’s Days was someone else’s holiday, after all of ours had departed this life, but I don’t anymore. Too many memories of those family-laden dinners are too good to ignore, the crackling conversations and zany arguments around the table after the second bottle of house red had made the rounds.  I’ve even started to look through the old photo albums without too much distress. It’s good to celebrate again.

 

And if I’m in the GWN around Mother’s Day, I still deliver flowers, only not so many. 

 

Usually just the one rose.