I remember standing in the hallway to the front door. We used that door to run outside and play. When we had guests, which wasn’t all that often, they would come in the kitchen door next to the driveway.

On one side of the hallway was the coat closet, deep and dark. Besides boots and coats, there were various important papers, a collection of B.B. guns, and other things yet to be discovered.

On the other side of the hallway was a giant built-in book case. To a four year old that could only reach the first few shelves, it seemed like a three or four story building, although growing up in Williamstown, I didn’t have much of an idea of buildings that large. I often hung around these book cases. There were stories to be found there as well as great piles of paper from my aunt who worked in the paper mill.

One day, I decided to write my first book. I folded a few pieces of paper together and wrote a simple story. I don’t recall it exactly, but the title was something like “The Great Oak” and the story was something like “An acorn fell on the ground and grew into a big oak tree.”

My mother smiled and from then on, always encouraged me to write.

There was a big oak tree behind the house. It would shower the yard and the sandbox with acorns. Up in the oak tree was a shipping pallet, nailed firmly to a couple branches. That was our tree house. Further up the hill, there was a large rope, the kind you climbed on in school, hung from another rope between two trees. This was our Tarzan swing. We would climb up the hill, firmly grab the rope and careen out over the hill and back.

One day, I didn’t have a firm enough grip, so the rope flung me out over the hill and I couldn’t hold on. I’m not sure how far I fell, twenty or thirty feet, probably, and landed on my back in the bushes. The bushes helped break the fall so nothing else got broken, but it did knock the wind out of me and scrape up my back pretty badly.

I ran down the hill, trying to cry, but no sound would come out. No air would come out. I’d breathe in refilling my lungs, try to exhale and not have enough breath. Eventually, there was enough air in my lungs to let out a giant wail and my mother came running.

She tended the scrapes on my back, and soon, I was outside playing in the sandbox again. Another time, I ran out the front door of the house, my right arm extended to push the door open. But instead, I put my hand through the glass of the front door, and my mother tended those wounds as well.

It seemed that I was always accident prone, and my mother would to tend to the injuries, the broken arm, the concussion, the time I got hit in the head with a rock, which came fractions of an inch from killing me.

Beyond the injuries, there was always work to be done. We lived on a small farm and many of my memories are of planting seeds, pulling weeds and helping my mother can the vegetables. We would all sit around the kitchen table, snapping the ends of beans and cutting them into bite sized lengths. We would shell the peas, bag after bag of peas to be frozen, or we would husk the corn.

Another memory I have of my mother was standing next to her as she hung clothes out to dry. The clothes line was a long loop run on two pulleys. One end was attached to the side of the house and the other was on a tree at the edge of the woods. My mother would clip the clothes onto the line with clothes pins and give the line a little tug to move the wet clothes closer to the tree, and repeat the process. It was a quiet meditative time when I just enjoyed being around my mother. Yet for her, it was probably tedious. The endless clothes of four growing children must have been a burden.

The house was small and with two adults, four kids, and at times, a dog and a couple cats, very crowded. It was the top floor of a Sears’s kit and less that one thousand square feet. These days, it would be a trendy ‘tiny house’.

There was also all the cooking and baking to be done. My mother would bake our bread, as well as bake bread for communion at church. On special occasions, she would get together with other women of the community for sewing circle. That’s what girls night out was for her when I was young. They would gather and talk as they worked on the sewing or knitting that needed to be done. She would make two large tea rings. One, she would bring with her to the sewing circle, and the other was left at home for the kids.

She would bake our birthday cakes. For my birthday, we would get seafood from the Boston Fish Market. Money was tight, but I remember one year, we even went out to dinner at the Captain’s Table. That was the night that my Uncle Charlie, my mother’s brother-in-law, had a heart attack coming home from dinner and then spent a couple weeks in the hospital.

Yet I don’t remember much about parties on her birthday or on Mother’s Day. Perhaps it is too long ago and I have just forgotten. Perhaps, I was so caught up in my own world, that I don’t remember much about what was going on for people around me. Perhaps, some of it, was that Mother’s Day just wasn’t the big commercial event it is today, or if it was, we missed it because of how tight our cash was.

So now, I sit in my house, a year and a half after my mother died, doing what she always encouraged me to do, write.

Happy Mother’s Day