If I titled this Memories of My Mother, would you think it hokey?

Memories of my mother flitted out of nowhere, settling on the barbed wire. I was waiting for Home Resource to open in search for new display ideas. Mom always loved the snow; it is snowing. Mom always loved those little round-bellied birds; there's a flock of them in my vision. She had given up by the time I arrived in Arkansas to help. She could have carried on, as Pop did, but she wouldn't. It would have taken a cattle prod to move her.

Mom learned to drive late in life. My sister was already born, and Pop had bought the 1957 Ford Fairlane which Mom learned to drive, because we were moving to Oregon, and she would have to help drive. We were all regular church goers, and it seemed, half the congregation saw her the day she couldn't restart that Ford and got out to kick it in the busiest intersection in town.

Driving freed mother to visit the sick and shut-ins, an action she considered her Christian duty. At a formative age, I found myself in the company of the elderly, the ill, the injured, heaps of National Geographic magazines, and others (i.e. Arizona Highways), and daily newspapers sometimes in grand old houses ripe for exploring. Those are among my fondest childhood memories.

I must confess, I feigned illness to avoid attending church sometimes, because it bored me to tears. My father often escorted me outside and used his belt on my behind, when he caught me with some trinket or toy I took to church to play with rather than listen to the sermon. I was a kid, for Christ's sake , and what the preacher had to say meant nothing to me. Alone at home with my illness, the radio tuned to the African-American church service in Oklahoma City, I rocked out.

Still love National Geographic. Still love my mother, too. She's still around, you know. On a recent morning, as I sat in my car in front of Home Resource, she arrived as a flock of birds and danced on the wires in front of me.