Fireflies

Kathy Payne

May 10, 2023

Sun Valley Writing Project

Fireflies

A memory from long ago comes back to me. I am six and living in the pink house on Ebenezer Road in Rock Hill, South Carolina, the town where my mother and father both were raised. It is the house between Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey on the left who are older and sweet and gave me a wallet for my birthday, and the house on the right where a woman whose name I can’t remember gave me my first pixie haircut in the small salon attached to the side of her house. I hated the haircut then, but looking back at faded black and white photos, it was adorable. My mother was right.

I live in the pink house with my paternal grandmother Katharine, my mother Doris, my brother Jimmy, our black poodle Schatzi and our grey cat Nutmeg. My dad is away fighting a misguided war in Vietnam and my mom cries a lot, scared that he is not coming home. I don’t understand the risks—I just know I miss him terribly, but I also like the Vietnamese dolls and silk pajamas he sends me. I wish he was here to swim with me in the pool Katharine put in her back yard. I am lucky to live in a pink house with animals and a pool. I miss my dad though.

We go over to my Aunt Gertrude and Uncle Paul’s red brick ranch house for dinner. They are the ones who took my mother in when she was eleven and her dad remarried. As we arrive, Paul is frying the catfish he caught fishing and making hushpuppies from a corn meal mix in the open carport. My brother and I rush to help. Katharine, Gertrude, and Doris have sweet tea in the living room and Paul sends Jimmy and me on a quest to see who can catch the most fireflies in the mason jars with tin lids that we have poked holes in for air. We run around the front yard as the light dims, and we catch the elusive fireflies with their taillights that flicker off and on. Katharine comes out on the porch stoop and laughs at us. Like her son, my dad, she has an amazing laugh that is best when she laughs so hard that she snorts. She does this often when we are around. Then my mother leans out and shouts, “Dinner. Come and get it!”

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I’m having trouble adjusting to my new reality of not being a high-powered business executive. My expectations don’t meet my current circumstances. I’ve been managing my mother’s life for the past few years, and it is a different kind of stress altogether. One where no one else has the same sense of urgency that I have. Certainly not my mother who had let her life fall into shambles around her over the past few years. Finances needed to be straightened out after an unscrupulous advisor took advantage of her. Overdue bills needed to be paid. Her condo and car both needed major repairs. And, finally, my brother and I made the decision to move her to a retirement home near me. It’s been a lot. I’ve done it without any corporate bonuses or accolades. Unlike when I worked in the business world, no one seems to have any timeline or urgency to respond to my questions or concerns. In fact, it often seems like no one cares.

After she moved into her new place, my mom told me that this latest move across country to her new retirement home was the easiest move she had ever made. I almost spit my drink out. I laughed loudly. “Well of course it was,” I said, “you didn’t do anything.” It’s almost funny if it didn’t make me cry. In her defense though, she did move our family a lot over the years and I’m sure I wasn’t at all helpful for those moves. So, yes, this move was a lot easier for her.

I spend a lot of time, talking to nurses, physical therapists and all the numerous caregivers who take care of my mom now. She doesn’t really know how much time it takes. But I think she knows that she is safe and taken care of and that I have a lot to do with that. She does thank me, even if it is usually followed by the statement, “Well of course, I raised you well.” My new role is one where patience and kindness matters most and I’m not skilled in those areas. I’m much better at being the person who makes things happen, the person who solves problems.

I stop by to say hi and check in on my mom. She’s forgetting a lot these days. I encourage her to take a shower while I’m there and wear something nice to the retirement home’s New Year’s Day party. “There’s a party?” She asks this with total delight and surprise. “Yes, you would know that if you actually left your apartment and saw the notices in the elevator.”  I say this gently, but I really would like her to leave her apartment more.

Baby steps. I say this to myself often. While she showers and dresses, I polish her silver service and untangle all her necklaces that got tangled in the move. Her apartment is starting to look nice. Like the home she left. I remind myself that it’s been a lot for her to move. It really has. I pat myself on the back for making it happen.

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I didn’t always get along with my mother. I remember once being upset when I was a teenager because my father sided with my mother in an argument when I knew I was right. He later told me a story about how my mother and I were the two most important women in his life. He loved to impart “life lessons” through stories. He said in his faint southern drawl that I was going to leave him one day soon, while he was going to spend the next twenty-five years with my mother. He cocked his head and asked me gently, “Who would you side with?” I snidely replied that I would side with the person who was right. At that point, I knew I was doomed and ceased the pointless arguments with my mother. I was never going to win.

I think about my mother’s life growing up. It wasn’t easy. As she is losing her memory, I think of all the things and people she has lost along the way. She lost her mother when she was six. She went to bed one night with a mom who loved to have Doris help her in the kitchen and woke up with a distracted and absent father. She lost that father five years later, when he married another woman and she and two of her sisters moved in with their older sister, Gertrude. She lost her nanny, Willie Mae, at that same time—the person who kept her safe and loved during those years after her mother died. The person who took her to church and told everyone to be nice to Doris because she lost her mama. To this day, Doris recalls with love, and admiration, her memory of how Black women dressed for church with fabulous hats. The hats remind her of Willie Mae, a strong woman who loved my mother at a time she needed it most.

She lost many belongings and left friends behind during the multiple moves as an Army wife—at least fifteen moves by my count before this last move to her new retirement home. She lost twins at the young age of twenty-four in a different country. The arrived too early and didn’t survive. She didn’t even know she was pregnant with twins until it was all over. She almost lost me as an infant, choking on something, but paramedics arrived in time. She almost lost my brother to anaphylactic shock from wasp stings, but he got to the hospital in time. She’s lost so many friends to illness and old age that she has lost count.

She lost every one of her eight siblings: Albertus, Anne, Gertrude, Bertha, Emily, Jimmy, Laura, and Sally. She lost her eldest sister Anne to Alzheimer’s disease. She took care of Anne until the end, remembering all that Anne had sacrificed for Doris to send her to college and take her away from the future of mill work in the small southern town where they all grew up. She lost Gertrude, who took Doris in despite a young child of her own and the hard life of shift work in the fabric mills. She lost her mother-in-law Katharine to emphysema—the one who lived in a pink house that we all shared while my father fought in Vietnam. She is the only one left to remember the Hearon legacy, to remember what it was like to grow up after the depression in that South Carolina mill town known for producing gingham fabric.

And hardest of all, she lost her husband Jim to a Glioblastoma brain tumor when he was seventy-six. She thought he would live forever, it anyone could. He ran marathons and went helicopter skiing at seventy-four. She lost the person who loved, cherished, and spoiled her more than anyone. They met at fourteen in high school biology class and were together for the next sixty-two years. My dad liked to say that Doris was the most beautiful girl he had ever met. He simply could not believe my mom loved him despite his teenage acne. My mom loved Jim for his brilliance, kindness, and zest for life. He was from a family of educators and became an award-winning professor at the United States Military Academy where Doris spent two decades of her life as an officer’s wife. How could he have left her behind like all the others?

But throughout it all she has remained grateful. She has had a very good life. She looks at all she gained, not what she lost. She remembers the good—her large family, her amazing husband, her two kids who lived, her life of travel and her life now in a beautiful apartment in her retirement home in Atlanta. Sometimes she rewrites history a bit to take out the bad parts—but don’t we all do this and live a bit in revisionist history?

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It was Doris’ 90^th birthday on April 25, 2023. I couldn’t be there. I sent e-mails to all her caregivers to help make her day special. I sent a beautiful orchid on behalf of all her family. I reminded everyone to call and text her and send her cards. I reminded her to check her mailbox. My friends stopped by to visit her on her birthday. They gave her a birthday balloon and a birthday throw. They sent me pictures of a smiling Doris.

My brother and I went to Atlanta the weekend following Doris’ birthday to take Doris out to dinner. She had a large martini with olives, a little food, and a lot of dessert. We took many pictures and celebrated all she’s lost and gained. Ninety years of living…of moving forward…of the people who made Doris who she is, who touched her and who she touched along the way. I posted a photo of Doris enjoying her birthday celebration on Facebook and it garnered more likes than any other photo I have ever posted. She loved seeing all the birthday greetings from near and far. She loved her momentary celebrity status as the ninety-year-old birthday queen.

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At the red brick ranch house in South Carolina, we eat our delicious meal of catfish and hushpuppies while drinking our sweet tea. I feel loved and safe with my Uncle Paul, Aunt Gertrude, Katharine, Doris, and Jimmy despite my father being so far away across the globe. At the end of the evening Paul tells Jimmy and me that we need to let the fireflies go. “It would be cruel to keep them,” he says. Jimmy protests because he is sure that he has caught more than me and we should count them first.

We open our jars gingerly and the fireflies, like Doris’ memories of her life and the souls of everyone she loved and lost along the way, fly tentatively and gently into the warm, muggy southern skies.

I think now of my father, grandmother, aunt, and uncle long gone and only seen in photographs today. I think of their love and lessons imparted. I think how much Doris must miss them. I think of those southern nights, and I miss them too. But the pink house, the Vietnamese dolls and silk pajamas, the hushpuppies, sweet tea, and the flickering fireflies are imprinted on all our souls in a way that not even time can erase.