When my mother made her home a crow?s nest
A daughter recounts her mother?s memory loss?and mounting fascination with crow figurines My mother loves crows.
She is 73 now, but she was 55 when my father died of cancer. I was a sophomore in college. When we buried his ashes six months later, crows pecked at the gray ground around the gravestone. They were on our heels, indifferent to our task, quick to do their work.
At the time, my mother was in the midst of finishing a Ph.D. in English literature, the final step in a plodding path away from her first career as a psychiatric nurse?the only profession she had been told was available to her in 1962. After the burial, she wrote a poem about the crows in the cemetery. The birds became portents. Whenever she saw them, there was my father. Her grief was cloying. I let her have it. I went back to school and crawled into bed between classes. But it wasn?t until my mother began collecting crow figurines that I became alert to their presence. If I were my dog, I would have gently torqued one ear toward the disturbance. The crows started to show up in my mother?s 1890s Vermont farmhouse at an exponential rate. Every time I came home for a visit there were more. Silk-screened prints, magnets, pillows. My teeth hurt when she asked me what I thought about her new acquisitions in a voice that peaked in a kind of delight I wished she was getting from a new novel, or a lecture at the college up the road.
The house in Vermont is not the house I grew up in. It is the house my mot...
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