Thoughts on Mother's Day
My mother was quietly psychic. Not the usual maternal 'eyes in the back of her head' psychic. I developed that myself when I had children and learned it's a combination of informed guesswork and good hearing. Mum's speciality involved family and NZ Post.
'I think there'll be a letter from Chris – or Annette, or her brother - today,' she'd say as she trotted down to the letterbox in her high-heeled sandals. And often enough she'd be right.
She didn't make much of it, as if she expected it to be one of her skills, alongside running up our clothes on the sewing machine, making better-than-shop-bought fish and chips for our 'penitential' Friday dinners or framing up a prize-winning photo for the A&P show.
And if you'd met my grandmother, you'd expect it too.
Nana was 4'11', rotund, cheerful and massively superstitious. If she saw a coin on the road she'd dash out to pick it up, risking her life for a ha'penny because if you turned down the small gifts, Fortune would withold the big ones. It made sense when I was 10. Later, when I read Cider with Rosie, I could picture my Nana with her country English accent and hordes of badly dressed children fitting right in with those families. She was born in Stafford in the 19th century and although she cheerfully adapted to whatever life threw at her, she looked as though she'd be most comfortable to have stayed there.
My mother on the other hand was born in the 1920s which in rural Hawke's Bay was not much different from the 19th century. She knew how to milk a cow, make butter, cook a roast and do laundry by boiling it up in the copper before she left school – and she left school at 12 because who then would waste an education on a girl? She was 16 before electricity came to the area and even then water still came from the well, pumped up by hand, and food was cooked on a wood range where the fire needed to be constantly stoked.
Around this time she got a job in the local store where she added to her skills by learning how to wrap groceries of whatever awkward shape in a neat brown paper parcel and tie them with string. She could weigh gumballs and aniseed drops by the ounce and slice cheese or bacon as required. Her time at the store was a happy one, but it ended when her mother needed her back at home, probably because another baby was due.
Not surprisingly, my mother looked to the future and always sought the finer things of life. She learned to develop and print photographs to a level where she could run a small business as the local photographer – weddings, baby photos and portraits much in demand. She was a perfectionist so it's unlikely it paid her much for her long hours but I think it was satisfying. Dad, as expected, did the providing.
Eventually, my parents got a phone and the letters were mainly replaced by regular dutiful phonecalls. Mum's psychic ability seemed to survive modernisation.
'I thought it would be you,' she'd say, picking up the phone when I called. Did she though? Perhaps she would have said the same if it was my sister on the line. But it sounded welcoming.
Then emails, other computer skills, digital photography came in and each time Mum was an early adopter of new tech. Just not the cellphone. She had little time for it and kept the one my sister gave her languisihing in a drawer, somehow feeling it would be a waste of electricity to charge it. She was probably right. By then her hearing was sadly diminished and she would have found its tinny high-pitched ring as out of range as bat squeaks.
As the limited world of deafness and dementia took hold, her psychic skills were reduced to fantasy and paranoia. One of her last happy conversations with me was about her much-loved brothers who she said were working on a new building at the resthome she now lived in. She showed them to me – fit young men on scaffolding on the building across the carpark, far too young to resemble my memories of the now long-dead uncles. She said they were too busy to visit but they waved sometimes. If they did, bless them. They made her happy.
So, am I psychic? Well, perhaps, in a low key way. Apart from the aforementioned eyes in the back of my head, I can finish your sentences. And I had a week recently where everything seemed to have a numinous portent. But modern communication doesn't really give the skill much practice. There's rarely any mail in the letterbox, even the bills are sent by email these days, and it's hardly clever to greet a caller by name when your cellphone rings! Maybe it's one of those skills, like making soap or mending boots, that has died with the last generation.