The Thursdays I Owed My Mother

The Quick One

In Hollis Grove, Missouri, population nine hundred and change, you get your label before you get your driver’s license. Mine was “the quick one.”

My sister Wanda was “the steady one.” Five years older, braids that stayed braided, a girl who could hem a skirt on the first try and who has driven the same school bus route for twenty-six years without once, I think, wondering what was past the county line.

Mom led the 4-H sewing club for thirty years, and her kitchen table was where half the girls in the county learned to set a sleeve. Wanda’s seams were straight the first time. Mine I ripped out three times and then started cheating, because I could make a thing look done in half the time it took to make it be done. So I quit the sewing table and went where I was wanted, which was Dad’s shop.

It was a tin-roofed building behind the house, with a woodstove and a radio that got the farm report and the Cardinals and nothing else. Dad built the oak rocker in that shop the winter of 1965, and it sat in the front room by the window all through our childhood. The winter I was nine, the runners went dull and gray. Mom said the chair was thirsty. Dad carried it out to the shop, set a rag in my hand, and said I could do the oiling.

I wanted to slap it on and be done. He put his big hand over mine.

“Thin, Gail. You can’t hurry linseed. Let the wood tell you how much it wants.”

I stood over one runner for the better part of an hour, making coats you could see through. It was the longest I stood still on purpose until I was fifty-six years old.

“Oak’s like people,” he said, not looking up. “It remembers what you do to it.”

I did not think about that sentence for forty-seven years. I thought about it a great deal this spring.