Sounds

By Katherine Mahon

From The Aputampkon Review, Vol 1

Voices from Downeast Maine & Coastal New Brunswick Canada

2006

pages 100-103

Revised, May 2023

Gram poured her coffee into her cup, every morning. Dropped in one spoonful of sugar and stirred. The spoon touching the edges as it circled around and around, stirring more than necessary, making a clinking sound that annoyed my mother. That sound irritated my mom every morning of her life since she could remember.

My mom never spoke of this or any other annoyance that her mother caused her until I was an adult. We were in her kitchen chatting. The kitchen I grew up in. Gram quietly shuffled in to make her afternoon tea, which again required the scoop of sugar and the stirring. After the stirring ceased, my mother rolled her eyes at me. Gram shuffled back to her room with her tea. Mom and I were alone again in the kitchen and this is when she shared this lifelong annoyance. It seemed so petty to my twenty-something, know-it-all ears. “Lighten up Mom,” I thought to myself. My father and five siblings and I knew Gram was not easy to live with. What we did not know was what it was like to be her daughter.

Gram did have her good points as my grandmother. She lived with us since I was born. When I was little, Gram would let me lie on her bed and watch Hawaii 5-0 with her after dinner. She would play cards with me and never pretend to let me win--she’d play for real. She let me go bowling with her and she seemed proud when her senior friends made a fuss over me. She shared some drawing techniques with me she learned in her senior citizens painting class that sparked my interest in drawing for many years after. I always felt Gram and I were the only artists in the family.

Now, I think about how different my mother’s life is from mine, from how our mornings began to bigger differences. My mother is an intelligent woman. Educated. Well-read. And thoughtful. Her mother did not finish grade school. My mother raised six children and has one loving, wonderful husband (my wonderful Dad). Gram had two husbands. We don’t know much about them except they had drinking problems. The first husband was my mother’s father, but as children, she would only tell us he was kind and reminded her of one of my brothers. My mother’s father died just before she married at age twenty-four. I seemed to always know this, but now I can’t imagine my father not being around for my wedding day. How heartbreaking that must have been for her. Gram’s second husband was not mentioned much. I got the feeling it was taboo to ask about him.

As I neared my thirties, Mom shared more with me about Gram. She told me that diagnosing people was not common when Gram was growing up. But if Gram was diagnosed today, she would be labeled “depressed” and probably “mentally challenged.” Mom told me that when she came home after school, many days Gram would be sitting at the kitchen table still in her nightgown with her head in her hands, looking as though she had not moved since breakfast. Mom said she rarely asked friends over because Gram was like this a lot and this embarrassed my mother.

My siblings and I thought Gram was crabby and easily rattled. We never took her seriously when she yelled at us or chased after us with a yardstick, never catching us. She was never mentally challenged or depressed. She was just Gram.

When we were kids, it was curious to us that Gram could be so functional about some things, but would never put her dirty dishes in the dishwasher like we had to, even after she was told more times than the rest of us needed to be told. She was like one of us kids but got away with more. She rarely shared a greeting which was pretty well accepted by my siblings and me. “Morning Gram,” or from my Mom, “Good morning Ma,” was usually replied to with silence or a “Whaah?” from Gram. Among us kids, it was kind of funny, but we could tell it always bothered my mother. You’d think she’d have given up trying, but she never did. Gram was greeted every morning for the last thirty years of her life by her daughter, who secretly wished to be greeted back.

Even though I did not know much about Gram’s history, I was baffled by how Mom could be so smart and wise and funny, so deeply kind and strong, without having the same kind of mom I have. At my “wise” age of almost forty, my mother still offers me guidance. Who did this for her when she was my age? I know she is nurtured and fueled in other ways, yet I feel a sadness that she will never know what I know. She does not know the feeling of a mother softly hugging her goodbye at the kitchen door for an extra few moments, conveying with a gentle stroke on her back that she is loved. She does not know that brush of a kiss on her cheek just before she is released from her mother’s embrace, hearing her whisper “I love you, honey.” It is her children’s and grandchildren’s birthright to have this, but it is not my mother’s.

I think of all this as I make my morning sounds, trying not to wake anyone. Grinding the coffee beans, filling the dog’s food and water bowls, while telling her in a loving whisper, “Go to your place.” Placing the bowls on the ceramic tiled floor, never failing to make a loud scraping sound and finally in a quiet, enthusiastic voice, saying to my dog, “okay!” Then the final drumming crescendo…putting away the clean dishes, with every clank impossibly loud no matter how hard I try to be quiet.

The coffee is ready and I fill two warmed cups that I have preheated with hot water, his black, mine with half and half, and one spoonful of sugar…stir, stir, maybe more than necessary, but I do need to make sure the sugar is dissolved. Maybe that is all Gram was ever doing. She may never be forgiven for that, but my mom has forgiven much bigger things. My throat tightens with both sadness and love as I stir. My eyes fill with tears. Because while it is so easy to love my mother, it is not with this same ease that my mom loves hers.

I awaken a bit from my thoughts and I am back in my kitchen, back to the reality of a new day and those I love still asleep upstairs. I wonder in this last bit of silence, “What do my sounds stir in them? Will they hear how much I love them?”