{"id":929,"date":"2015-05-08T06:00:34","date_gmt":"2015-05-08T13:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=929"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:40:03","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T04:40:03","slug":"you-dont-know-what-youve-got-til-its-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2015\/05\/08\/you-dont-know-what-youve-got-til-its-gone\/","title":{"rendered":"You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ‘Til It’s Gone"},"content":{"rendered":"

The words from that old Joni Mitchell song surfaced in my head today: \u00a0You don\u2019t know what you\u2019ve got \u2018till is gone. \u00a0That one line is playing over and over for two reasons. \u00a0Number one is that Joni Mitchell is having serious health challenges. I\u2019m sorry about that and wish her well, but the other reason for thinking about those words has to do with this coming Sunday–Mother\u2019s Day.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s only now that she\u2019s gone and I\u2019m much older that I\u2019ve come to understand the profound impact my mother had on my life. \u00a0Sitting here all these years later, I can still see her outside with clothes pins in her mouth hanging freshly laundered clothes on the line. \u00a0That always happened on Mondays. \u00a0On Tuesdays her ironing board was set up in the living room so she could do the ironing with one eye on the TV set. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In South Dakota she drove her Ford tractor like nobody\u2019s business, but when we came to Arizona and she needed to learn to drive a stick shift car, it wasn\u2019t at all the same thing. I remember sitting in the back seat with my older sisters issuing timely warnings, \u201cHold on. \u00a0Mommy\u2019s gonna jerk.\u201d \u00a0I also remember a series of four black and white photos of her, all of them taken with her fold-out Kodak camera. \u00a0In each of those pictures she\u2019s standing before the front gate of the house on Yuma Trail, holding a newborn baby in her arms as she brought my three younger brothers and one younger sister home from the hospital.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bad daughter that I am, I don\u2019t remember the exact day she passed away. \u00a0(By the way, I am one of those people who doesn\u2019t use the word \u201cpassed\u201d alone in that regard. \u00a0In my lexicon, the word \u201cpassed\u201d must be followed by the word \u201caway.” \u00a0Passed all by itself seems unfinished somehow, or maybe even naked.) \u00a0I do remember where I was when my sister called to give me the news that our mother was gone. \u00a0Bill and I were in a room in River Place in Portland, so it must have been at one end or the other of a book tour. \u00a0I also don\u2019t remember exactly what was said during the last conversation between my mother and me, with the \u00a0two of us talking quietly in her room at the convalescent center in Sierra Vista–her home during the final months of her life. \u00a0It was spring when we spoke. I knew that in a few days Bill and I would be heading north to Seattle for the summer. \u00a0I suspected that was the last time I\u2019d see her, and it was <\/span><\/p>\n

She was totally with it that day. \u00a0She knew who I was, and she knew I was leaving soon. \u00a0We talked about nothing in particular which, at that point, is also about everything in general. \u00a0No tears were shed, at least not in the room. \u00a0I saved mine for later during my solitary drive back to Tucson. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m always surprised and grateful when Evie’s words surface unexpectedly in my blog or in my books. \u00a0Her wit and wisdom creep into Beaumont\u2019s memory when he\u2019s recalling his mother. \u00a0And my own mother is certainly in my mind\u2019s eye and ear when I\u2019m putting words into the mouths of either Joanna\u2019s mother, Eleanor Lathrop Winfield, or Ali\u2019s mother, Edie Larson. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was my mother, with her seventh grade education, who put my feet firmly on an academic path when I was in high school. \u00a0That encouragement came in the guise of a bribe. \u00a0She told me that if I\u2019d take seven solids\u2014no study halls\u2014I wouldn\u2019t have to do as much housework as my older sisters had\u00a0to do. \u00a0For someone who was smart but lazy, that was a no-brainer. \u00a0Taking seven solids for the next four years was part of what helped me go on to college. \u00a0That was almost entirely due to my mother\u2019s sage advice. \u00a0It had nothing to do with the school counselor, Miss Woundy, who took pains to tell me I was NOT college-bound material. \u00a0I\u2019m so glad that my mother was there on that December day in 2000 when the University of Arizona awarded me an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. \u00a0I was the one on stage receiving the degree, but I felt my mother should have been there, too. \u00a0It was her honorary degree every bit as much as it was mine.<\/span><\/p>\n

For Evie Busk, children were \u201cto be seen but not heard.\u201d \u00a0She also didn\u2019t believe in “sparing the rod and spoiling the child,\u201d nor did she pull the old \u201cWait \u2018till your father comes home,\u201d routine. \u00a0In our father\u2019s absence, she was perfectly capable of dishing out the \u201cflyswatter treatment,\u201d thank you very much. \u00a0My most well deserved bout with that came after my friend, Donna Angeleri, and I ill-advisedly went wading in a \u201cmine water\u201d pond. \u00a0I did so in my brand new hand-me-down green and white sun suit. \u00a0The chemicals in the mine water wrecked the suit completely, and it was immediately consigned to the rag-drawer, never to surface again. I remember the frilly sun suit, but I remember the flyswatter encounter even more.<\/span><\/p>\n

On those occasions when the whole family piled into our woody, nine-passenger Mercury station wagon, that\u2019s how our mother maintained order. \u00a0My father would be at the wheel, with my mother in the front passenger seat, holding a baby in one arm with a fly swatter in her other hand. \u00a0If things got out of hand somewhere behind the front seat\u2014arguments over whose turn it was to sit by a window or who was tormenting the kid next to him–my mother\u2019s flyswatter arm could reach bare thighs even in the far back back.<\/span><\/p>\n

With very little money and seven children to raise, my mother couldn\u2019t afford to spoil any of us, and she was sparing with compliments. \u00a0The new parenting stand-by, \u201cgood job,\u201d were words that never passed Evie Busk’s lips. \u00a0I vividly recall the circumstances surrounding one of the rare compliments she gave to me. \u00a0It was the late seventies. \u00a0I was living and working in Bisbee, selling life insurance. \u00a0These were the old days when female \u201cdress for success\u201d costumes called for a two piece suit, high heels, and pantyhose. \u00a0We had stopped off at my sister\u2019s house on Bisbee Road for some reason. \u00a0My mother was driving. \u00a0She stayed in the car with my two kids in the back seat while I walked up the sidewalk and onto the porch. \u00a0It turned out my sister wasn\u2019t home, but when I got back into the car, my mother uttered four words that I\u2019ve never forgotten\u2014\u201cYou\u2019ve got good legs.\u201d \u00a0I was nothing short of astonished.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m seventy now. \u00a0My legs aren\u2019t what they used to be when I was a thirty-something, but I still treasure that compliment and because my mother said those words once, and they still feel true. \u00a0I\u2019m sure my brothers and sisters have pieces of our mother\u2019s verbal treasures tucked away in their hearts as well. \u00a0I know we all remember the lyrics of each of the songs she taught us, helping us learn to sing them in three-part harmony.<\/span><\/p>\n

So yes, Joni Mitchell is probably right. \u00a0We don\u2019t know what we\u2019ve got \u2018till it\u2019s gone, but at least I\u2019ve got it figured out now.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thanks, Evie, and Happy Mother\u2019s Day. <\/span><\/p>\n

You were one great Mommy.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The words from that old Joni Mitchell song surfaced in my head today: \u00a0You don\u2019t know what you\u2019ve got \u2018till is gone. \u00a0That one line is playing over and over for two reasons. \u00a0Number one is that Joni Mitchell is having serious health challenges. I\u2019m sorry about that and wish her well, but the other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[53,5],"tags":[14,136],"class_list":["post-929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bisbee","category-family","tag-evie","tag-mothers-day"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-eZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=929"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":933,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929\/revisions\/933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}