The Grammy Storm
My mother, who would have been 97 Thursday, told us there had been a storm every year within a week of her birthday. When the temperature hit 80 degrees earlier in the week, I figured there might not be a "Grammy storm" this year to remind me and my children of this feisty woman who died in 1992.
Wrong! I got to walk to Maxson Middle School Friday in a raging sleet storm. When the hood of my coat fell back, I got ice pellets down my neck. When I put my hand up to hold the hood against the wind, I got little ice balls up my sleeve. Grammy, a force of nature unto herself when her Irish temper took hold, was duly remembered.
After my press assignment, I decided to take a four-minute train ride back to Watchung Avenue rather than walk another half-hour through the storm. At Netherwood, I saw a robin looking very out of place in the ice-covered parking lot. Once home, I saw another one in the driveway looking perplexed as the layer of sleet deepened between him and the worms he was hunting for lunch.
On Saturday, sunshine brought out the crowds to go shopping at Park & Seventh. But the aftermath - slush, ankle-deep icy pools and hard, slippery patches of coagulated sleet - made getting around a challenge for pedestrians.
The old girl, as my sister Jane and I irreverently called my mother, has been long gone from such earthly tribulations. She had a hard life, losing her mother to the Spanish Flu and being raised by relatives in a small coal-mining town in Pennsylvania. Her father took another wife and raised that woman's children. My mother could be bitter sometimes, and with due cause. The fury of nature matches her often-expressed anger over those early losses and the hardship of childhood as a virtual orphan.
Rest in peace, Mary Teresa "Jean" McLaughlin Fortune.
Wrong! I got to walk to Maxson Middle School Friday in a raging sleet storm. When the hood of my coat fell back, I got ice pellets down my neck. When I put my hand up to hold the hood against the wind, I got little ice balls up my sleeve. Grammy, a force of nature unto herself when her Irish temper took hold, was duly remembered.
After my press assignment, I decided to take a four-minute train ride back to Watchung Avenue rather than walk another half-hour through the storm. At Netherwood, I saw a robin looking very out of place in the ice-covered parking lot. Once home, I saw another one in the driveway looking perplexed as the layer of sleet deepened between him and the worms he was hunting for lunch.
On Saturday, sunshine brought out the crowds to go shopping at Park & Seventh. But the aftermath - slush, ankle-deep icy pools and hard, slippery patches of coagulated sleet - made getting around a challenge for pedestrians.
The old girl, as my sister Jane and I irreverently called my mother, has been long gone from such earthly tribulations. She had a hard life, losing her mother to the Spanish Flu and being raised by relatives in a small coal-mining town in Pennsylvania. Her father took another wife and raised that woman's children. My mother could be bitter sometimes, and with due cause. The fury of nature matches her often-expressed anger over those early losses and the hardship of childhood as a virtual orphan.
Rest in peace, Mary Teresa "Jean" McLaughlin Fortune.
--Bernice Paglia
posted by Bernice at 9:09 AM
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