Her Last Orcas Island Birthday

My mom turned 85 in July and it’s probably the last birthday I will get to celebrate with her. She lived out her dream of moving to Orcas Island, and she will soon be moving to Texas to have closer proximity to health care and assisted living situations near three of my other siblings. If she were to wake up here one day and not be able to get up on her own, there are very few options on the island. She would immediately be stuck, destined for a facility in Anacortes or Bellingham where ferry schedules would dictate when I could even see her.

It’s so hard to think that she will trade all this peaceful beauty for 100-degree heat, concrete, and city life. She doesn’t relish the thought, but she’s focusing on the plusses. She’ll never tolerate a negative thought.

My sister came from Texas for our mom’s birthday week with a cake photo on a bag, so we dove into the art of colorful cake-baking to mark her eight-and-a-half decades on this earth. She used to ride a horse in Central Park as a kid, she picked tobacco on a farm one summer in Alabama, she waterskied with her Catholic college youth group, she was proposed to six times, and helped deliver umpteen babies in a free New Orleans hospital as a nurse. She and our engineer dad had five of us, and almost made it to the 50-year anniversary mark but he passed away. She has always loved dancing, music, spontaneity, laughter, and love. And wine and cheese.

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In the last six years, my mom has become less and less interested in practicality, frugality, and sensibility. She’s all about going for it. I could write a book about the funny things she’s done lately, and she actually wants me to. The other day she asked if I were including a chapter on her in a book I’m currently writing. I told her I didn’t want her legacy to be all of the quirky things she’s doing in her later years. She replied, “Well, I want you to write about me! It’d be so funny!” She said that the day after she stood in line at the store too long, got too tired to keep standing, and sat down over at one of the tables and opened her unpaid-for Bourbon, Fresca, and baked chicken. She poured a drink, ate lunch, and paid later.

It all began with her first quirky grandma move – she was having our then-four-year-old over for a date and offered him some cough drops since she didn’t have any candy. When I came to get him, he told me he had been eating cough drops. When I blurted out some surprised response, my mom said, “Well you don’t like for him to eat much sugar, and I didn’t have anything fun for him to eat anyway. I figured cough drops were a good alternative!”

Oh golly.

Happy Birthday, Mom! I love that you’ve gotten to spend these years on Orcas Island. That’s seven years of Friday-night movie dates I’ve gotten to have with you – over 350 dates, just the two of us. We’ve watched six seasons of Downton Abbey, two seasons of Call the Midwife, three seasons of Victoria, two seasons of This Is Us, hundreds of Jeopardy! episodes, and more crappy movies than I can count!

I love you. You’re the best mom I could have ever asked for.