Eight.

Mamma has recently had minor surgery on her knee and was told by her doctor to stay off her feet, keep her leg elevated and generally take as much time as is required to heal.

Anyone that knows my mother knows also that she can only view this prescription as cruel and unusual punishment. To sit and relax is torturous for her. To be told to be patient is almost an insult. Whenever I call to check on her I can hear her working at the stove or folding laundry. Reminding her that she is supposed to be taking time to heal is useless.

"Yes, yes, I'm relaxing. Do you think these tomatoes are going to can themselves"? is generally the response.

So, she continues to climb up and down the stairs, canning vegetables, watering the garden, feeding the chickens and caring for the house. When her knee becomes really sore she alternates between catching up on her e-mail, reading, or some sort of creative work with her hands.

Some time ago she begun embroidering a tablecloth and napkins. It was a project she originally started to pass the time while camping or relaxing in the evening, with no specific end-date in mind. Recently it became one more weapon in her arsenal to defeat the growing restlessness as she was forced to sit, leg propped up under pillows.

As soon as I walked into the dining room the other night I noticed the completed tablecloth, steamed and drying on the table.



My mom often told me stories about her own mother's ability to work with her hands. In addition to the necessary work of repairing the family's clothing, knitting socks, and turning collars, she had a creative eye that turned the ordinary into the beautiful. One of my mom's earliest memories is of having a hand-me-down gray winter coat transformed into a pretty new thing when my grandmother covered three acorn caps in brightly coloured wool and then fixed them to the lapel of the coat with a pin. To the little girl that my mother was it was a magical transformation that made her enter the classroom proudly. She talks about being given hand-me-downs from cousins and having them similarly changed into new and original items created especially for her by her mother's hands. I remember sitting as a little girl, listening to my mother transported back to her own childhood, and describing specific items of clothing she wore years earlier in detail.

I, of course, have similar memories. Of a forest green, wool pinafore dress my mother made for me in grade 3, with ruffles running down the front straps and brightly embroidered flowers dancing across the front. I felt like the prettiest girl in class. When I fell and put a hole in my favourite jeans I protested tearfully against a patch until she made me one of a bright red apple, complete with a curtained window and a front door, open to reveal a worm tipping his hat to the morning. At some point I went through the requisite tomboy phase and insisted I would no longer wear dresses; so, she made me a cowboy shirt and embroidered an entire native village on the back: teepees, a central fire with people gathered around it and someone using a blanket to make smoke signals with it. Somehow, the memory of this clothing and of standing on a stool, turning slowly while she critically viewed her work, is still capable of transporting me back into my childhood.