I can call you that now. I suppose you always were "dearest" of my mothers, since you were the only one. But what I mean is, you're gone now and memories soften around the edges and fire burns out and anger fades...now I can make you part real and part what I want you to be. As someone with whom I correspond and share secrets—ah, now that was part of our real relationship, too!—I am free to write out whatever I want to you. The difference is that you won't refute or criticize or wave away. You are a vessel and I am the burbling water that pours into it, free of fear.
I'm drinking a glass of sherry and it's an autumn night and I remember that you always snarked at my taste for that brew. You said it was only for "little old ladies." I suspect, by your generational ruler, that when you said it my current age would put me in that category! So, mother, I am a little old lady now and I drink sherry.
But I have very different associations with that apertif, have had for years. Here are some of them:
- making a trifle and soaking lady fingers or pound cake in sherry in any of my various temporary kitchens. Always delicious!!
- laughing, chattering, and numb in the face with a group of my favorite officer's wives in Cornwall, drenched in sherry in the middle of the day. Lord, it was hard to sober up and cook dinner for Rick at night! Tea parties, they called them, but more sherry than tea.
- elegantly dressed and sitting at a long, gleaming table in the Officer's Wardroom on a Ladies Night, sipping sherry—or port or madeira—with a group of uniformed fly boys and their ladies, and my husband.
- wine tasting in the Napa Valley and getting tipsy on various kinds of apertifs, including sherry.
- admiring the luscious nutty color and smooth flavor of it on my tongue—just about any time.
- Reading novels—usually Irish or English—where people of refinement sip sherry. Since I have a taste for period pieces and UK locales, I've drunk a lot of literary sherry.
It's only a small step from sherry to malt whiskey, the taste is different but the color can be similar, and the face numbing qualities even more pronounced. You and I shared an affinity for that liquor; I let mine drop off in favor of wine but you never did. I can't remember the last time I had a whiskey, but I will always think of you when I see Glen Fiddich.
No, I take it back, I do remember: we toasted to you post mortem with your preferred drink. It seemed fitting.
There are pinpricks of light and love that stream through our clouded relationship, mom. These are some of them and they're enough to make me wish you back, stronger and younger than you were at the end. Maybe being an old sherry drinking lady at this point, I could stave off your bullying and demand the good bits prevail. Maybe not. But I wish I could try. You did love me. And I would be a liar if I didn't say that I loved you, too. Perhaps too much. Perhaps that was the trouble. Love and need are as smoothly integrated as wine, and I couldn't tell them apart most of the time.
Here's a sherry to you, mother. Hope there's whiskey where you are. Now that would be a place I wouldn't mind going to.
