Mama

revamped and reposted from May 2024

Comfort to everyone who is smarting this Mother’s Day. You may be caring for an ailing mother, dealing with your own illness, or navigating grief—grieving the loss of your mother, a difficult relationship with her, a lost opportunity to become a mother, or the loss of a child.

Like so many beautiful things, motherhood is fraught with the potential for harm and suffering.

I’m so grateful for my mother. Here is a little reminiscence. As a tribute, it falls short.

Happy Mother’s Day.

*Note: Growing up, I was known by my nickname Becky. My mother’s name is Courtenay, which was also my middle name. As an adult I began using it as my first name. You might say I’m Courtenay, Jr. (although she did not name me after herself).

photo by Randall Starnes

Life on Rainwater Road came with challenges, which our mother met with a calm ingenuity. To assuage my fears of the feathered yard menace known as Mean Chicken, Mama painted his yellow-white likeness on a red kitchen cutting board hung right above where she would fry okra and pork chops. For my fifth birthday, she threw a “Dress Like Your Favorite Doll” party at Newnan’s Waterworks Park. All the girls and our mini companions (each in an outfit to match her girl’s) lined up along a picnic table set with tea cups and saucers. My doll and I wore white lace dresses, and my outfit included an accessory. I carried the same frilly parasol that would later serve as my defensive weapon against Mean Chicken’s inevitable assault. After a decisive battle, I presented the decimated pink accoutrement to my father as evidence of Mean Chicken’s bona fide aggression. Finally he believed the stories I’d been telling him and handed over the offending bird to a friend, whose family enjoyed a nice chicken dinner.

One day Mama pulled up to the house with a car-full of kids to discover the cows had gotten out. We found them blocking the road, nonplussed and chewing. Out of the car we all piled, waving our arms and calling, “HEYyah!!”  As we made it a bit further down the dirt road past the house we found several of them taking a dip in the pool, their long tails languidly splashing away mosquitos in the chlorinated blue of the water. On a hot day in Georgia, they were understandably reluctant to leave. Their Hollywood lashed eyes gazed away from us without concern. Alongside an inner tube floated a few choice turds too large for the leaf filters to trap.

These bovine escapes became common occurrences, which must have been exasperating for Mama, who always had at least one child still in a car seat and a trunk full of groceries melting in the heat, and may have been eager to get inside to put her feet up with a tall glass of iced sweet tea. Yet rogue cattle, like other things to come in life, were no match for her. She has always taken whatever comes at her with grace and a sense of humor. Life's usual disappointments provoke her strongest reaction: "Well, fooey diddle," while greater let-downs bring out her care and concern for everyone besides herself.

Mama in those days was wholesome, all-American sexy—a combination of Maryanne and Ginger from Gilligan’s Island. Her childhood friend Mitzi still says all it takes to make Courtenay happy is the beach and a Hersey bar. Throw in a puppy and a cold beer and you have one very content lady. She effortlessly puts everyone at ease without a hint of pretense or judgement.

When our brother Candler was small, he would sit on Mama’s lap, put his little hands on her cheeks, and utter the word most of us had been searching for: “Creams.” His description was spot on. Her cheeks are divinely soft, luxuriously creamy (so much so that one “Cream” would not suffice and had to be stated in plural). I’ve always loved their delicate layer of downy peach fuzz with the faintest scent of pecan pie or Chanel, No. 5.

Day after summer day, Mama would lie in the sun with her brown legs outstretched, while my sister Dorothy and I frolicked in the backyard pool. Legend has it those legs had won sixteen-year-old Courtenay a First Prize distinction in a beach contest where she had to prance among other beauties with a bag over her head. I was never quite sure whether to believe it but still resent that Dorothy inherited those legs, while I ended up with my father’s more muscular version, with little in the way of ankles. My theory was that God made me from the top down, and when he got to my calves he was called to another project so in the rush simply attached the feet without any narrowing. This would explain my short stature as well.

The first thing you’d see in the pool house was the Hi-Fi with cassette tapes. Hearing “Honky Cat” takes me right back to a sopping towel on hot concrete and the smell of Coppertone. The same goes for “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” “Chain of Fools,” “Get Together” (Come on, people now…), or “Put Your Hand in the Hand of the Man Who Walked On the Water.”  On your left was a bar, stocked with Coca-Colas, Oreos, and Lays Ruffles potato chips. Directly across from it was a shelf spanning the length of the long room, eye level for grown-ups. It was lined with our drawings on paper plates and art projects from school.

Mama had made the entire pool house into our art museum. My magnum opus was a circus scene drawn on large poster board with magic markers. Trapeze artists swung and reached for each other’s hands high above the crowd. A lady acrobat stood on one leg, stretching the other back in arabesque, all while poised atop a festooned elephant. A dog balanced a large multi-colored ball on his nose. Lights and crowds of mesmerized families spanned the ring. Obsessive work on “The Circus” would consume most of my attention on a trip to Florida’s Fernandina Beach, as I swatted the sandy fingers of rambunctious little brothers away from my masterpiece. But my favorite project was a city scape we had created in Mrs. Rogers’ art class. This imagination-stimulating assignment was replete with possibilities. I reveled in the varieties of miniature people with their busy lives lived behind countless windows, lit and unlit. I kept adding little cars, signs, trees, shops, bridges, animals, street lights, and rooftops. All of this imagining probably sparked the urban inclinations that would later draw me to live seven years in New York City.

There are people who would be most at home either amid the sirens, exhaust, and dense bustle of Manhattan, or the birdsong, honeysuckle, and expansive calm of Rainwater Road. I’ve never been happy in the middle ground, my heart always yearning for one extreme or the other, but longing still for both. The book of Revelation describes heaven as a city, an idea I find exciting and appealing. And yet my childhood memories recall a certain heaven on earth that could be reached at the end of that mile of Georgia dirt, there with my family’s exuberance steadied by and centered around our mother’s easy warmth, at the end of Rainwater Road.

Special thanks to several of you who have given me feedback on earlier iterations of this memoir in progress, friends and family, members of Pawling Writers Group, and especially Janisse Ray and Gerald Smith. I am indebted to you and grateful for your support.

Mama makes a cameo in my last post, The Marshallville Gnats—now free for all to read.