By Marian Carache
As we approach another Mother’s Day, my third without my mother, I go through old photographs searching for a certain picture I want to hold in my hands again. It is dated “1959” on the back.
The photo is of five generations of women in my mother’s family, starting with my great-great-grandmother, whom we all called “Mother.” Next to her stands Mama Brown, my great-grandmother; next is “Mymama,” my grandmother; followed by my 30-year-old mother, “Mama,” wearing the blue suit she had worn earlier that year to her grandfather’s funeral; and I, at five years old, am the little girl in the photo, wearing a dress Mama Brown made for me and holding both of Mama’s hands while looking up shyly at the camera.
We are in Florida at Mother’s house. There are Chevrolets and Plymouths in the background, and just outside the frame there are orange and kumquat and satsuma trees. Not in the photo, but in my sensory memory, there is pipe and cigar smoke wafting from where the men are gathered to talk southern politics.
An earlier photo of a similar arrangement exists, another “five generations” picture of family women, this one dated “1930s.” In it, Mama is the little girl, and the oldest is “Big Mama,” my great-great-great-grandmother.
One of my friends used to beg me to repeat the names of my relatives in each photo, and then roll in laughter as I chanted the alliterative incantation to motherhood: “Big Mama, Mother, Mama Brown, Mymama and Mama” — followed by “Mother, Mama Brown, Mymama, Mama, and me.”
They are all gone now. Only “me” is left. But I sleep in their gowns, keep warm in their robes, wear their rings. I repeat their stories and cook their recipes.
Every time I read the poem “Grace,” written by my late friend, Alabama poet Jake York, tears well in my eyes: when I crack the eggs, pat the butter on the toast … my great-grandmother moves my hands to whisk, to spatula, to biscuit ring, and I move her hands too, making her mess, so the syllable of batter I’ll find tomorrow beneath the fridge and the strew of salt and oil are all memorials.
His words ring so true that they take my breath away.
I gaze at the two photos, and I memorialize the mothers whose DNA I carry.
