The Notebook That Spoke For Her

I wrote down the good days too. There weren’t as many, but there were some, and I am glad now that I wrote them down, because I would have let them slip away otherwise, the way the bad days never let you let them slip away.

One Sunday in her fourth year, I found her at the piano. She had not played in longer than I could remember, her hands had gotten too stiff, her mind too far gone for the sheet music to mean anything. But that Sunday she sat down and her fingers found “Blessed Assurance” without a single wrong note, start to finish, the hymn she’d played every week of my childhood for the eight o’clock service. I sat on the bench next to her and sang the words because she had forgotten most of them, and for three minutes she was entirely my mother again, clear eyed, humming low under my voice, and when the song ended she patted my knee and said, “You always did sing flat, Sandy,” and laughed, and I laughed too, and cried at the same time, and wrote it down that night with my hand shaking.

We were not alone out there, and I want to say that plainly too, because it would be wrong to tell this as if the whole weight sat on one set of shoulders with nobody else in the county lifting a finger. The ladies from Mom’s church took turns bringing a hot dish out on Wednesdays for years, long after most families would have stopped remembering. Pastor Nolan drove out once a month just to sit with her and hold her hand and pray even after she stopped knowing who he was, and he told me once that it didn’t matter whether she remembered the visit, it mattered that somebody came. Our neighbor two farms down, a widower named Jeff who’d known my dad, kept Mom’s gravel driveway plowed every winter without ever once being asked or thanked properly for it. None of that is in the notebook. The notebook was for medicine and moods. But I want it known that Hartwell held us up plenty, even on the nights it felt like my family did not.