She wasn’t a sparkling wit, and I can’t recall ever hearing her guffaw. But she certainly wasn’t dull, though she wasn’t particularly insightful. She could be a bit overbearing and to my mind, unnecessarily strict, but in addition to putting her husband through medical school, and raising five fabulous children, and volunteering in all things Church and Community, and still having time to make chicken tortilla casserole, Madre knew how to keep her family in line.

The woman broached no nonsense when it came to malingering, and she was unmoved at the sight of our blood—unflappable and unsentimental in the face of catastrophe. I vividly recall the time Diana Hollis came screaming, hysterical, to our front door late one afternoon. “Mrs. Hansen, Mrs Hansen,” she cried in a treble shriek that carried up and down the length of Ferncreek, “Jimmy cut his heel off on the go-cart and he’s bleeding all over everything!”

Madre didn’t miss a beat. “Tell him to stay outside on the porch,” she shot back from the kitchen. “I just mopped the terrazzo.” (Madre was nothing if not practical.) Not for her the frantic trip to the doctor for our inevitable scrapes and sniffles. No, Madre had another method for dealing with the infirmities of childhood.

She had. . . The Sock.

I don’t know where it came from; it was probably found abandoned and rotting in the back of the covered wagon Grandma took across the plains to the Promised Land. The Sock was knitted of scratchy raw-wool-pus-yellow yarn, ribbed down the sides for maximum discomfort, and had been first basted in, then liberally smeared with a reeking layer of Vick’s Vapo-Rub so potent that sixty years later the mere memory of it causes me to dry heave. (Glaaagh.) Whenever one of us would complain of a vague malaise, out it would come to force our hand. And uncharacteristic of her normal frugality, Madre made sure to renew it with a stinking glop of Vick’s at each and every use. Thus prepared, she tended to what ailed us, securing the woolen abomination around our necks with a rusty diaper pin, immovable and inviolate.

It itched.

Let me amend that; it itched like a motherfucker. It itched like the fleas of a mange-ridden cur. It itched like God’s own poison oak patch around the trunk of our tiny toddling necks, and she always made sure to fasten it as tight as a cervical collar—just short of actual strangulation. Sore throat? Ear infection? Scarlet fever? It didn’t matter; if it oozed, ached or dripped we got… The Sock. In theory, germs and viruses were supposed to see that thing coming and shrink away in terror, but in truth, I believe it held a more sinister purpose. Madre was a busy woman, and Madre was no fool.

Accordingly, none of us dared fake an illness to try to get out of school or snag an extra hour or two in bed, because no matter if it was a tummy ache, a runny nose, or a case of the barfs, we knew what was waiting for us in the back of the medicine cabinet. Some sick little kids we knew got chicken soup and old movies. Some got board games, and soda pop, and soothing lullabys. But the Hansen kids got a dark room, utter silence, and. . . The Sock. (Actually, there was another horror I forgot to mention; first we got the thermometer, THEN we got The Sock.) It was Madre’s way of triaging our sincerity.

As for its healing powers, well, you can believe that we “recovered” as quickly as possible and with as little fuss as possible—and stayed that way for fear of spending another night with that awful thing gagging us to sleep. It was that effective. . . .

When I got a bit older, Madre turned me into her toady and initiated me into the Motherly Mysteries of The Sock. I learned how to smear on the Vick’s just so, how to smooth out the ribs and adjust the safety pin. I learned how to still the squirming neck beneath my scrawny elbow and fasten The Sock just short of choking. And when my victim was finally allowed release from its stranglehold, I learned how to fold The Sock and roll it up and stuff it back in its midnight blue glass Vick’s jar… for next time. (And with five sneaky kids there was always a “next time.”)

********

I don’t recall the exact circumstances, but in the mid-recent past, Madre sent the sock down to me as an adjunct birthday present, and I have to admit that after all those years, I beheld it again with some genuine fear and loathing. I held it by the toe, far away from my person—like some grunty diaper—and marveled at the longevity of that ancient rusted safety pin.

And yes, I tried it on.

It was threadbare and ragged, from 50+ kid-years of trying to claw it off, and shrunken from the three or four times it had been washed, but it still fit. It still choked me, and it still itched like a motherfucker.

With a nostalgic chuckle, I put it away “someplace safe” as a sort of perverse keepsake, and Madre and I had a good laugh over the thing, but somewhere along the line I forgot all about it and it disappeared. I’ve spent the last three weeks wracking my brain as to where it might be and tearing my closets apart searching for it—heroically, I might add—all to no avail. I even tried my sister Laurie’s suggestion that I “just sniff it out”, but so far it’s eluded me.

I know there’s no way it got thrown away—that would have been sacrilege—but the thing was so noxious I’d not be surprised if it had gotten up and skutched away under its own power, and is now lying in wait somewhere until just the right moment when it can sneak back into my bedroom and insinuate itself around my throat some night as I sleep—the stuff of nightmares and evil clown cartoons.

I never thought I’d miss that god-awful itchy, stinking thing, but now that Madre has gone, it occurs to me that there was so much love and concern smeared into its magic juju, and so many answered prayers inherent in its fraying old threads, that now it’s the most precious thing I can possibly imagine, and it just breaks my heart that I can’t find it so I can smear it with Vick’s and sleep with it pinned securely, comfortingly, lovingly. . . under my pillow.

My mother died last week. Wednesday?—or was it Thursday? My mind is so on autopilot right now I really don’t recall. I’ve shed sporadic tears, tears that come mostly when I talk on the phone to my siblings and friends, but because I have no idea how I am supposed to feel, or act, or re-act, life in the last few days has proceeded pretty much as normal; I’ve never lost my mother before, you see, so I’m kind of at a loss as to how to play this one. My father asked (as if Daddy ever “asked” anything of us,) that we leave him alone for a few weeks in the house he and Madre shared for so many years. As he put it, he had loneliness, anger, guilt and five or six other emotions to process and didn’t need the distraction of condolences while he was doing so. That’s exactly how I feel, like a sick cat that goes under the porch to puke in peace. Friends have told me that the realization would “hit” at some point, but because my mother is so much a part of who I am, and because although we speak by phone weekly, I can count on both hands the number of times I’ve seen her in the last twenty years, the loss of the actual day-to-day reality of her being here or not being here has been limited to minor annoyances like not having her around to give me my niece’s cell phone number so I can call to commiserate. I’ve been expecting Madre to pay me a goodbye visit, just for form and maybe to impart some last bit of wisdom or assurance, but so far she’s not made her final presence known. On the morning after her death, perhaps hoping to commune with the ineffable, I went outside into the sunshine to take a nice long walk in the woods with my beautiful young German Shepherd dogs; their gleeful, exuberant energy always cheers me when I’m feeling depleted and discouraged. They’re eight months old now, and halfway grown, having survived a horrible bout of Parvo as five-week old babies that bonded us in a way only two weeks of shared explosive diarrhea and vomiting and needles and laundry can bind three hapless hill creatures together in misery. I adore them both, but the male, Albert, has been my soul mate from the start, quick and generous, an amazing athlete, almost uncannily obedient. Of all the dogs I’ve had over the years, his connection with me has been by far the most intense and intuitive, so much so that I’ve begun guidance training him as an eventuality against my deteriorating eyesight. But here he was lying dead on the patio as his sister, Daisy, hovered uncomprehending and frantic. His beautiful golden body, that luxurious fur, his extraordinary tail, were inert and cold. What felled him, I can only guess—maybe a cardiac defect from the Parvo? But all I could feel when I saw him there was just another level of numb. Not loss, not sadness, simply utter resignation; I had a grave to dig in the hard September granite—and I had to dig it now. I’ve had to do this before; more times than I can count, actually, and each time for valued friends of my ranch family. Cats, dogs, horses, even a couple of pet chickens and a pot-belly pig lie buried in holes under various trees, vines, gardens. And it’s always the same: a hard, muddy, heart and backbreaking slog to get them in there. The ritual is pretty simple: Gather together my wits, fetch all the various shovels, post hole diggers, a hose to dampen the earth—then somehow drag the cold, dead, awkward weight of my departed friend to the burial site, and get started. ########## Digging a grave is a combination of horrifying, heartbreaking, infuriating and comic; it’s exhausting in every sense, a process that forces you through the emotional gamut and well beyond the limits of your physical endurance—sustained only by duty and adrenalin. You’re going to get bruised and muddy, humiliated by the soil. You’ll get sweaty and discouraged, frustrated by root systems and underground boulders where you thought you had a good clean hole going. Shovel handles break, muscles and ligaments shred, fingernails snap off at the quick—and then there is the awful reality of the corpse to deal with. If you didn’t get to it early enough, the body will be frozen in the most inconvenient and space-consuming configuration possible, and the only way to make it fit is to either break bones or saw off limbs—neither of which you can bear to contemplate—so you Just. Keep. Digging. Until your back feels like burning knives and your muscles are trembling in protest, and the tears stinging your face turn to sweat. But by the time you’re though and the last shovelful of dirt tamped down, you’ve made your peace with the dead husk of your friend, and have handled the corpse just enough that its horror no longer touches you. It’s just a thing now, a shell that had to be buried because it was beginning to stink– that undeniable truth of our organic temporality. The whole burial process is so healing, so primal and metaphoric, it’s almost poetic, and most Americans have no idea how evolved and symmetrical a process it is. We rely instead on industrialized ritual, the coroner, the mortician, the hearse, the crematory or cemetery with its front loaders and artificial turf, and the hired “technicians” and “directors” to do the dirty work. But I like the duty and the penance of digging a grave myself, wresting the dead shell of my friend into it, sobbing a final goodbye into the cool wet earth beneath my cheek, the finality of the sound of the first shovelful of dirt as it concusses off the chest, covers the once-beloved face. The way the earth shifts as I tamp it, cover it with rocks to guard against scavengers, leave spent in every way to drink a comforting toast to calm the pain of it all. ########### The next morning Daisy and took our customary walk up to the spring. She tried to be interested, I tried to be distracted, but Albert’s absence on our hike was so palpable we were both just going through the motions. When we got to the spring we first looked for bears, then sensing none, Daisy went for her obligatory splash through the muck while I looked up into a perfect blue sky on a perfect fall day and just wailed and keened with loss. Still sobbing, I sat down on a dried cow patty in despair, empty and spent. And that’s when Madre came to me. She always told us she’d wanted to be a forest ranger and have six boys so she could spend her days roaming the woods with them. Instead, she’d married a medical student, put him through school and training, moved to suburbia, and in between popping out four daughters and a son, worked as a pharmacist while establishing herself as a social force in our posh coastal Southern California community. None of us, her children, really got to spend much time tramping through the woods with her—although singly we’re all inveterate trekkers and naturalists. But in that moment of corporal disconnect, the sentimental, magical-thinking side of me realized that now her once-fettered spirit has the world’s best dog to roam the Ever-After Woods with. And Albert has the big welcoming soul he really needed to guide therein. And that simple conceit brings me comfort.       RIP Beverly Mae Liechty Hansen, April 12, 1926 – September 24, 2014