My mother is with me. Not as in a wispy sighting at the foot of the bed, or a message in my ear. While she was not known for subtlety in her youth, she has mastered it now.

 

Mom told me stories about living in the forties, when all the boys she knew... and they were just boys... put on uniforms and pretended to be brave. Dad was one of them, on a ship in the Aleutians before he could grow a beard. But he was not chatty about it, and certainly never implied that he was a hero. 

 

In cryptic words, she tried to convey the impact of a vengeful man with a mustache thousands of miles away. My attention was divided then, after all it was in the past, but now I am listening. Holding my breath. 

 

During the war, women like mom were allowed to work, because the men were gone and factories needed bodies. She picked strawberries, which sounds pleasant enough if you are eight carrying a basket in a field near your grandmother's house. But she was talking about nine hours bent over in a posture that I try hard to avoid, in the baking sun of August.....since climate change had not yet shoved heat into November. 

 

They were thrifty, she and her eleven siblings, knowing how to squeeze a meal out of a few potatoes. One woman who was also from that generation told me that sometimes her brother would bring a friend home for lunch.

 

"Because today is his day not to eat at his house..."

 

Some of the reassurance from my mother was conveyed through children. Today I sang in the preschool, which is what I did on 9/11 in the same room. The children shared their unfettered trust in God with me, as we sang about disciples in a boat during a storm. 

 

"Oh men, of very little faith, now why were you afraid?"

 

So many reasons. 

 

Mom gently pointed out that this was also the same room she taught in, sixty-five years ago, when I was a preschooler. She did not reprimand me for my anxiety, even though it sounds like Jesus did. Her presence with me, as I plodded numbly through my responsibilities, was about something even bigger than a hurricane. She let me know that her years of sweat, and staving off hunger with day old bread, and tamping down the ever present threat that boys she wrote to each week would never come home, did not break her. Did not break her family. 

 

The room I sang in today, and when the towers came down, and when my mother was the teacher, faces its own statute of limitations. In the spring, it will be toppled by bulldozers. 

 

The war mom endured lasted for four years. Which she reminds me did not rob her of joy on the other side.