April has been the proverbial cruelest month, in new ways dreamt up by COVID, and in Eliot’s most literal way: “stirring dull roots with spring rain.”
Damn, it’s rained a lot, and it continues to rain.
“Good for the farmers,” my mother used to say. Her father had farmed. She wasn’t a great gardener herself, but she liked to look at the world beyond her window. Six kids kept her from traveling much in my youth, but later in life she took to the road, west to the Bad Lands, east to visit me. Years earlier, when I lived in London, she came to visit me, and we went to Ireland together. The trip of a lifetime. She was half Irish. First born, her Irish mother gave her the middle name Carol for the O’Carroll clan from which her family is said to have sprung.
The trip was “of-a-lifetime” for me too, partly because for the first time, I got to see the place which created many of my favorite writers, and which they, in turn, created on the page. More than that, this is the only time I traveled with my mother in any real sense. I got a glimpse of her in the wider world. The last of the six, it was here I first saw her as a person beyond my narcissistic understanding of her as my mother.
Joan Carol Schumacher was a woman in the world. A woman of the world. In her own right.
We’ve yet to see: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?”
But here are a few buds.
–KLB
