laura hough smith

Sweet corn, watermelon and monkey grass
I miss my mom yearround, but her memory is never closer than in the summer.
She was raised in a tiny town 8 miles south of where I grew up in Sikeston, Mo. A lot of her family still live there, and her brother is the mayor there, although it’s changed a lot since her daddy was town marshal in the 1960s.
Still, one of my aunts lives next door and another lives across the street from the house where all eight children were raised and where my granny still lives.
The property takes up two blocks in the town with a population of 600 — they’re not exactly city blocks.
I think her country, rural upbringing explains a little of who my mom was.
She ate grape tomatoes off the vine. In fact, the day she went to the hospital with a pain that turned out to be cancer, she thought she just had indigestion from plucking a few too many from a vine near our backdoor.
Sweet corn was another summertime staple in our house. Most times, her bank customers brought her sweet corn by the bagful, but more than a couple times, she dragged me to some friends’ field to pick fresh sweet corn for us and her family. I complained the whole time, but some 25 years later, when a friend of Morgan’s brought freshly picked sweet corn to my back door in Greenville, I almost cried.
I thought of mama this weekend. Wesley, Morgan, Lollie and I kicked off the summer on Memorial Day weekend by making enough food to feed an army.
Friday night was fiesta night at our house, complete with Wesley’s salsa from a Viking Cooking School recipe. As I waited for the taco shells to brown, I started making fruit salad and stole a bite of watermelon in the process.
There is something about that first bite each summer. I thought of the decades of summer late nights my mom and I stood in a dark kitchen, with the only light coming from the one above the stove. We’d each have a spoon, half a watermelon on the counter before us and the salt shaker. Just a few bites. Heaven.
Nearly every night after dinner in the spring and fall, we took walks. In the summer — every night.
We’d clean the kitchen at breakneck speed to head out for a walk. Then we’d come home and sit outside eating popsicles until the mosquitos drove us in.
On Saturdays, my mom worked in the yard. Endlessly. There were always elephant ears to plant or transfer. Maybe a brother gave her a hydrangea bush to plant. One summer, she and a neighbor transplanted more monkey grass than probably is legal. Once when I was very young, I had to tag along to the scariest part of our farm, a solid forest, so she could dig up some young dogwoods for the median across from our house. She rode the lawn mower while my daddy ran the Weed-Eater and blower.
At 5-foot-1, she could move mountains. Solid, hardwood furniture was no match for her. My dad said he hated going out of town because when he returned, he wouldn’t know where to sit. What she couldn’t handle, she’d get my dad to do. If something needed construction, electricity or plumbing, she called her daddy or her brothers.
She multi-tasked, too. One of the last projects I remember her doing was turning our screened-in porch to an outdoor patio. This was while renovating her parents’ living room.
The winter was time for indoor projects. Her first love was sewing: Halloween costumes, baby bedding, curtains or embroidery. One fall, she made a costume for nearly all the characters in the “Wizard of Oz” for her great nieces and nephews. But the summer projects always had her on the move. She didn’t sit until popsicle time, and Morgan and I went where she went.
I spent the first summer after her death indoors and both raw with grief and amazed at my beautiful newborn. The following spring and summer though, I expelled most of my anger at her death on the brush in our backyard. I cut small trees down, tore out camellia bushes, all covered in and nearly suffocated by English ivy. And, without a trace of irony, I transplanted monkey grass by the wagon-full.
One weekend with Wesley away, I recruited Morgan to help me haul off railroad ties that bordered a tree. And when he was in Austin, I taught myself how to use his Black & Decker mini-chainsaw.
I was dangerous.
I needed a clean slate, and that’s what I got. I carried limb after limb and brush after brush to the curb. I cleared brush better than George W. Bush did in all his time on that Texas ranch, Wesley said. I had a project, and that, I see now, helped me recover from her death more than anything else except prayer.
Last fall, a couple days before the tornado blew change into our lives, I had two neat rows of verbinam planted along the fence line. I worried all winter if they’d survive after being crushed by the storm debris. Now, in June, they’ve taken off, and I’m in search of a new project. Of course, there’s always monkey grass to move.

© Laura Hough Smith and laurahoughsmith, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Laura Hough Smith and laurahoughsmith with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.