Sum Total

Of course these few things are not the sum total of my mother's life... but I see any of them, individually or as a group and instantly my mother springs to mind. The picture in the back is of her mother, my grandma, as a child. I use this image a lot A LOT in my artful collages. The china shoe is from my grandma's collection, dispersed and dispensed with in 1968. It is all that remains.The chicken trophy was won by her dad, my grandpa. He won lots of chicken trophies, oddly enough. The Hummel, the doll in the green dress and the pearls all belonged to my mother. She especially liked pretty things. I have lots of her pretty things... a ring, nice wine goblets, now the pearls...

And yet the thing that most reminds me of my mom is this ugly pitiful doll. I have held onto and protected this ugly doll most of my life... since I was ten or so. My mother made her when she was seven. This pitiful doll doesn't even have a name, though I have taken to calling her Ruth, my mother's middle name. I have long been amazed that a seven-year-old could make such a thing, shape the wire armature body, wrap it 'round with muslin strips, puff out the body, stitch on a head. Mom made the clothes... all from scraps, leftover bits of nothing,

The hair is fringe from her mother's bedspread. Mom, at age 7, snipped it from the very most visible center of her mother's bedspread and got into terrible trouble for the deed. "I got beat for that," she said. I do not doubt for one minute that my grandmother, enraged, certainly did beat her for cutting a snippet of fringe from a perfectly good bedspread. But my grandmother is long gone. The bedspread is gone. And now, too, my mother is gone. Only this doll, this pitiful ugly doll, remains. My mother died Sunday and all I have of her are these trinkets, among them this doll and the knowing that her hands made something out of nothing.... that's it... the sum total of a life. Something out of nothing, which is enough really... In fact it is everything.