Betty Blue

My mom was a woman of the Spring Valley Loop.

She loved southwest Iowa with a kind of reverence that embarrassed my brothers and me when we were children and now feels like inheritance.

It was a ninety-mile drive from our house to the tiny town where all four of my grandparents lived. Every single time we made the trip, my mom would begin explaining how the Loess Hills were formed and why the farmland in southwest Iowa was some of the most fertile in the world.

From the backseat, my brothers and I would exchange dramatic looks and groan in unison.

“Oh no. Not this again.”

At the time, we thought it was hilarious that she gave the same speech every single trip.

Only now do I understand what she was really doing.

She was teaching us to love where we came from.

The older I get, the more I realize how many ordinary things became inseparable from her.

My mom loved the color blue.

Not casually, the way people say they have a favorite color. Blue seemed woven somehow into her identity.

Her eyes were blue.

She looked beautiful in blue.

Her dishes were blue.

The house I grew up in was blue, eventually earning the nickname “The Blue Valley Ranch.”

The color became so associated with her that our family eventually stopped calling it by any ordinary name at all.

We called it “Betty Blue.” It started as a joke.  Eventually it became something else entirely.

Even now, so many of my memories of her arrive first through the senses.

My mom smelled of Estée Lauder White Linen.

After she died, I kept one of her shirts hanging in my closet far longer than I needed to, just so I could lift it to my face and breathe her in again.

Whenever I called her, she answered the phone exactly the same way.

“Hi, You!”

No one else has ever said those words quite like my mom did. So cheerful. So welcoming. As though my call was the brightest part of her day.

She lit up rooms when she walked into them. My friends adored her and would sit around our kitchen table talking with her for hours. She had the rare ability to make people feel completely at ease, as though they had known her forever.

Looking back, I think that may have been her real gift.

Not perfection.

Not performance.

Not even charm, exactly.

She made people feel loved.

She also moved through the world with a kind of quiet certainty I admired long before I understood it.

Posture mattered to my mom.

She was forever reminding me to stand up straight.

And to be fair, she practiced what she preached. She moved through the world standing tall and confident, despite being all of 5’4”.

Even now, I sometimes hear her voice in my head when my shoulders start to slump.

“Stand up straight.”

Every morning when we were growing up, my mom woke us with the same little verse she had memorized as a girl in her one-room country school:

“Good morning, dear children!” The old rooster said. “Come out in the sunshine! Don’t lie there in bed!”

When she was sick, my dad would sometimes try to wake her by reciting it back to her, though he could never quite remember all the words correctly.

What strikes me now is how perfectly that little verse captured the way my mom moved through life.

She did get up every morning. She put a smile on her face. And she went out into the world bringing light and energy with her.

But perhaps the people who felt that warmth most consistently were her children.

There were five of us, and somehow she made each of us feel uniquely special.

As a child, I never questioned whether my mom would show up for me. I simply assumed she would be there because she always was.

Swim meets.

Band concerts.

School events.

The ordinary milestones that make up a childhood.

Somehow, despite the constant motion and noise of a large family, she managed to come to all of it.

I remember scanning the crowd and feeling an immediate rush of confidence the moment I spotted her face.

She was cheering for me.

Proud of me.

Entirely present.

Only as an adult do I understand what a remarkable thing that was.

My mom gave her children one of the greatest gifts a parent can give:

the steady feeling that we mattered deeply to her.

Much of that love arrived through daily rituals.

Food mattered deeply to my mom.

Love, in her world, often arrived through the kitchen.

Every Christmas morning she made orange bow knots shaped like Christmas trees.

At Easter there were hot cross buns.

At rodeo time, sweet meat.

At Thanksgiving, scalloped corn.

And for years, she faithfully made baked beans for nearly every potluck our family attended.

My mom was extremely proud of those baked beans. She had perfected the recipe over time and cheerfully informed anyone willing to listen that she made the best baked beans in the world.

Then one day, after what I assume had become an exhausting number of baked bean appearances over the years, my dad looked down at yet another pot sitting on the kitchen counter and casually announced:

“I hate baked beans.”

Just like that, she never made them again.

But she never stopped telling people she made the best baked beans in the world.

I also remember an “International Pot Luck” for International Order of the Rainbow for Girls when I had been assigned to bring a vegetable dish from the United Kingdom.

My mom scratched her head, disappeared into the kitchen and emerged with a twinkle in her eye carrying something she called “English Celery.”

I honestly have no idea what was in it besides celery and cream of celery soup, but I distinctly remember several people asking her for the recipe afterward.

That was my mom.

She could turn almost anything into something people gathered around.

And some foods became so associated with her that even now they feel inseparable from my memory of home.

Chicken fried steak.

Lime Jell-O made with applesauce.

Box sheet cake with homemade powdered sugar frosting.

For years, that meal appeared regularly on our table, ordinary enough at the time that I never imagined I would someday miss it with an almost physical ache.

As children, we rarely understand that the meals repeated over and over again are becoming the architecture of home.

At the time, it was simply dinner.

Now it feels like love.

My mom loved Sunday evenings when I was little.

Looking back, I think they felt like a small exhale for her at the end of the week. A tiny night off.

We would all gather in the family room with bowls of popcorn and homemade fudge for dinner while we watched Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom followed by The Wonderful World of Disney.

At the time, it simply felt magical that popcorn and fudge could somehow count as dinner.

Only later did I understand that those Sunday evenings had very little to do with popcorn or fudge.

At the time, those evenings felt so ordinary that I never imagined I would someday miss them with such intensity.

But grief has a way of illuminating the quiet architecture of a life. After someone is gone, you begin to realize how many small comforts were actually built by their presence.

The week after my mom’s funeral, I had to take my son to his college orientation.

We overslept and spent the entire morning rushing. Somewhere along the way, I got a speeding ticket, which did not improve my teenage son’s opinion of the situation. By the time we reached the university campus, it was pouring down rain.

I didn’t know where to park and eventually left the car in a parking garage several blocks away. We ran through the rain, getting completely soaked, finally arriving breathless and dripping at orientation check-in.

Trying to recover, I asked the woman at the desk if it was okay to leave my car where I had parked.

She looked at me sympathetically and said, “No. Your car will probably be towed.”

So I turned around, walked the several blocks through the rain, climbed into the car, and burst into tears.

Not because of the ticket.

Or the parking.

Or the rain.

But because for the first time in my life, I could not call my mom and laugh with her about the absurdity of my situation.

That was what she had always done.

She made hard things feel lighter.

Embarrassing things feel funny.

Overwhelming things feel manageable.

She steadied people simply by sharing life with them.

I think that is why her absence felt so enormous.

I did not yet understand how rare that kind of love was.

I only knew that when my mom walked into a room, the room itself began to soften.

And even now, all these years later, part of me is still listening for the sound of her voice saying,

“Hi, You!”