Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul by Jack Canfield Read Free Book Online

you could not fall through. She longed for a beautiful house of wood or stone. Or of red brick, like the houses her many sisters and their husbands had. When I was thirteen, she found such a house. Green shuttered, white walled. Breezy. With a lawn and hedge and giant pecan trees. A porch swing. There her gardens flourished in spite of the shade, as did her youngest daughter, for whom she sacrificed her life doing hard labor in someone else’s house in order to afford peace and prettiness for her child, to whose grateful embrace she returned each night.
    But, curiously, the minute I left home, at seventeen, to attend college, she abandoned the dream house and moved into the projects. Into a small, tight apartment of few breezes, in which I was never to feel comfortable, but that she declared suited her “to a T.” I took solace in the fact that it was at least hugged by a spacious lawn on one side, and by forest out the back door, and that its isolated position at the end of the street meant she would have a measure of privacy.
    Her move into the projects—the best housing poor black people in the South ever had, she would occasionally declare, even as my father struggled to adjust to the cramped rooms and hard, unforgiving qualities of brick— was, I now understand, a step in the direction of lightening her load, permitting her worldly possessions to dwindle in significance and roll away from her, well before she herself would turn to spirit.
    She owned little, in fact. A dresser, some chairs. A set of living-room furniture. A set of kitchen furniture. A bed and wardrobe (given to her years before, when I was a teenager, by one of her more prosperous sisters). Her flowers: everywhere, inside the house and outside. Planted in anything she managed to get her green hands on, including old suitcases and abandoned shoes. She recycled everything, effortlessly. And gradually she had only a small amount of stuff—mostly stuff her children gave her: nightgowns, perfumes, a microwave—to recycle or to use.
    Each time I visited her, I marveled at the modesty of her desires. She appeared to have barely any, beyond a thirst for a Pepsi-Cola or a hunger for a piece of fried chicken or fish. On every visit I noticed that more and more of what I remembered of her possessions seemed to be missing. One day I commented on this.
    Taking a deep breath, sighing, and following both with a beaming big smile, which lit up her face, the room and my heart, she said, “Yes, it’s all going. I don’t need it anymore. If there’s anything you want, take it when you leave; it might not be here when you come back.” But there was nothing there for me to want.
    One day, however, looking for a jar in which to pour leftover iced tea, I found myself probing deep into the wilderness of the overstuffed, airless pantry. Into the land of the old-fashioned, the outmoded, the outdated. The humble and the obsolete. There was a smoothing iron, a churn. A butter press. And two large bowls.
    One was cream and rose with a blue stripe. The other was a deep, vivid blue.
    “May I have this bowl, Mama?” I asked, looking at her and at the blue bowl with delight.
    “You can have both of them,” she said, barely acknowledging them, and continuing to put leftover food away.
    In giving me these gifts, my mother had done a number of astonishing things in her typically offhand way. She had taught me a lesson about letting go of possessions— easily, without emphasis or regret—and she had given me a symbol of what she herself represented in my life.
    For the blue bowl especially was a cauldron of memories. Of cold, harsh wintry days, when my brothers and sister and I trudged home from school burdened down by the silence and frigidity of our long trek from the main road, down the hill to our shabby-looking house.
    Slogging through sleet and wind to the sagging front door, thankful our house was too far from the road to be seen clearly from the school bus, I always