Ain’t it funny how time slips away?
And how one unexpected word brings it swooping back.
Both of my parents were born in Blair County, Pennsylvania. So was I, in fact, at home, because the doctor was unable to come because of a serious accident on a farm. Mom did the heavy lifting while Dad dealt with my 2 and 4 year old brothers and the dog having puppies in the basement and the cat on the table eating the butter.
I was probably 5 or 6 before I realized my mother and grandmother pronounced w-a-s-h as “warsh” and everybody else said wash. Then I realized at some point that it wasn’t because anybody was right or wrong, but because that was how THEY learned it.
I hadn’t thought about that for a long time - decades - until I was listening to a story online and somebody said, “Supper’s ready. Warsh your hands.” Central Ohio. Close enough.
All at once memories of my mother spilled across my memory like snapshots. Mom, beautiful in a white jersey dress, playing softball. Dad took the photo, of a girl he hadn’t yet met. He told us many times, with a kind of reverence, “She ran like a gazelle.” They married at nineteen, in 1941.
Another of them at their wedding, in somebody’s backyard, smiling as if they were in their right minds, Dad’s hair slicked back, Mom’s lifting on a breeze.
Then a somber photo, my parents at 20, holding a tiny baby, standing close and looking like they were going to collapse, a corner of the swaddling blanket flipped over the infant’s face, because he’d died at three days old. Robert, their first-born, the brother my siblings and I never met.
The next one, my father in his Army uniform, my mother clinging to his arm, because he was shipping out to WWII, and each half of the pair were going to grieve their child separately, with an ocean between them.
Mom, wearing protective glasses, working at the Sylvania plant, while she waited for Dad to come home.
Amazing, how the word “warsh” can stir up a hurricane of memories.
Both of my parents were born in Blair County, Pennsylvania. So was I, in fact, at home, because the doctor was unable to come because of a serious accident on a farm. Mom did the heavy lifting while Dad dealt with my 2 and 4 year old brothers and the dog having puppies in the basement and the cat on the table eating the butter.
I was probably 5 or 6 before I realized my mother and grandmother pronounced w-a-s-h as “warsh” and everybody else said wash. Then I realized at some point that it wasn’t because anybody was right or wrong, but because that was how THEY learned it.
I hadn’t thought about that for a long time - decades - until I was listening to a story online and somebody said, “Supper’s ready. Warsh your hands.” Central Ohio. Close enough.
All at once memories of my mother spilled across my memory like snapshots. Mom, beautiful in a white jersey dress, playing softball. Dad took the photo, of a girl he hadn’t yet met. He told us many times, with a kind of reverence, “She ran like a gazelle.” They married at nineteen, in 1941.
Another of them at their wedding, in somebody’s backyard, smiling as if they were in their right minds, Dad’s hair slicked back, Mom’s lifting on a breeze.
Then a somber photo, my parents at 20, holding a tiny baby, standing close and looking like they were going to collapse, a corner of the swaddling blanket flipped over the infant’s face, because he’d died at three days old. Robert, their first-born, the brother my siblings and I never met.
The next one, my father in his Army uniform, my mother clinging to his arm, because he was shipping out to WWII, and each half of the pair were going to grieve their child separately, with an ocean between them.
Mom, wearing protective glasses, working at the Sylvania plant, while she waited for Dad to come home.
Amazing, how the word “warsh” can stir up a hurricane of memories.
