CAROLINE'S LAST GLANCE 

My mother, Caroline clung to her Southern heritage like a Yankee clinging to cashmere long- johns,in other words a necessity found in a creature comfort to softly wrap around the harsh realities of the day. 

She was a shimmering hummingbird of contradictions:

Fact : to my knowledge no one ever fought a battle as well as Caroline. She was a master of silently winning her point.

Yet , she was never unkind. She was not particularly bright, but she had the kind of compassion some people feel when they pick wildflowers.

Truism: Caroline did not listen particulary well, rather she waited for opportunities to insert her newest joke. She loved bad jokes and told them often and poorly. But, she liked them so much that it made me laugh just to hear her tell them. Yet, somehow, without listening to a word I said, she seemed to understand “The BIG THINGS “ in life .
She had some kind of uncanny connectedness with all things .

In reality: My father adored her, beyond measure and without contradiction.

I had issues stemming from the above mentioned Facts and Truisms

As her daughter I was always loosing those silent battles and often felt totally unheard.

I called her “Caroline “ because it fit our relationship much better then “Mother“.

She never grew up ,nor did she particularly want to …

And so, I left home the day after I graduated .went to Europe and finally moved to NYC.

Fast forward into my thirties ,Great Years of self discovery, I grew to really “get” Caroline. Finally, I loved her for real. Now, I was on my Father’s wave length and like him, I took total delight in watching her navigate through life; for example she cheated at crossword puzzles to impress my Father. She never grew weary of how he marveled at her clever she was “Only you Caroline could do a puzzle with such a confident ink pen.” It was the law that we never noticed her furtive little journeys to the answers in the back of the book and for that matter; we never noticed that she cheated at solitaire. Her nails most always manicured in celebration of all the attention they acquired.

AH, Caroline what a work of art you were.

Then, there was that day on the porch with her. I was forty something ,we had gone as we had so many times before, to watch the rain come over the meadow.

We both liked to smell the rain in the wind and to feel the breeze stir around us as the drops became a soaking rain storm.

What none of us saw, were the coming storm clouds of Alhemiers - insidiously claiming her in these slowly fading days …

On that particular day, suddenly and without reason , we looked at each other -We startled -then tumbled into each others eyes. I  no longer saw her as Caroline, my mother and she no longer saw me as the friend who became her daughter.

We saw the same all encompassing flash -behind and in front - a lightening bolt of awareness. We laughed like children. She intuited to me “this is the game Hide and Seek . Remember ? “ ! YES ! I remember” , I wordlessly intuited back to her.

Then the moment was gone and the rain clouds came way too soon.

Had she known her fate because she had that uncanny ability to uniquely see ?

Was she saying Good-Bye ? As she went into her last silent battle.

I will never know ,but I do know that at last Caroline had shown me a profound joke the last time we played ‘Hide and Seek ‘ we found .

Love is all there is .

Gnosis