Pasture to Paddy

My mother died last year, at 85. I didn’t go to her funeral. Ever since I can remember, she’d been a cantankerous, conniving, frigid bitch. She didn’t like her children, driving my young sister insane and suicidal while keeping my younger brother in a constant state of fear of ever becoming his own independent person. I was written off as a lost cause at about age seven. My father quit coming home with any regularity soon thereafter. The only two things I could figure she cared about were ranching and power. She was an efficient businessperson but not real likeable. One of my questionable mid-forties goals was to outlive mom: questionable because with her death I would have a vacancy in my brain, a vacancy that has been refilled by disgust with her and I because we never found the time to discuss our relationship while she lived. It’s a contempt I need to come to terms with so I can keep the brain clutter down. You see, good old mom lived her last years in great pain. And me, being a dutiful and spited son, had been going to see her twice a year since my early 30s, her maladies and surgeries not included. She could have died several times in her final 15 years but she held on through strokes and kidney and breast cancer surgeries. She held on until she knew I was getting to that age where body aches and pains start to be a major awareness issue, a topic of elderly conversation. In her last decade and a half, I can still see her smiling, and knowing, before passing on that my poor body, the one delivered from her womb, is slowing down. She could see my concentration of movement, hear the popping in my joints, and be gleefully snide that it was harder for me to get up from anywhere. Without enough walking and stretching, she noticed I couldn’t easily overcome soreness. She knew I mostly ate bland foods and drank plenty of fluids. She could easily guess I am careful about watching my bodily waste disposal, that I take my blood pressure weekly, that I pay attention to the increase in growth of my ear hair and toe nails – registering the bodily declines no one wants to talk about except on daytime TV. Good old mom, the true bitch in my life. I spent most of my daylight hours from age 27 doing things to ease my physical demise, so I would later be able to develop an idiotic desire to outlive her while wondering if I shouldn’t be at the pub or climbing mountains. Only I wasn’t doing a very good job practicing things to ease my physical demise. The gut-wrenching reality of needing to slow down raised itself from aching joints and muscles by training like a 20-year-old at 55+. The idea I hurt and that getting old isn’t simple was more difficult than I had assumed. I needed to get irrational revenge on my mother, not injuries. So, eleven years before she croaked, I took a deep breath and made some lifestyle changes. The cutting back on workouts took me some time to accept, but the pain has gone down naturally, much to my mother’s chagrin. More stretching, yoga, and deep breathing replaced kilometers and kilograms bent on destroying my joints and wrecking my muscles. The schedule I used simplified. My subconscious could take over and I no longer had to concentrate too much on how I bend my body, or chew, or spew. In a few months I reached a point where my thoughts could easily drift while exercising. My mainline use of gray matter began looking at my living past and searching for things, history so to speak. It’s hard, and proof, if one can find it, can prove how fallible those memories are. I would like to say I personally became rather preoccupied with my growing up as part of my later path through life but I can’t; I truly wanted to forget. Oh, yes, in my mid-thirties I started reminding myself of cowboy life - occasionally I would even bring up some anecdote at social gatherings; cocktail chatter so to speak. Whether I would go anywhere with such remembrances were definitely naught until mom up and died. Mostly I have made a sizeable effort to stay away from youthful memories because she’s in them all, an inescapable bothersome part. I more or less thought I was safe from her as I aged because I left her life desires after leaving home. It didn’t work, she’s still rattling around in my brain and I still have to live with her even though she’s dead. You see, my mother never wrote anything down, that was the job of her retinue. If anyone knew her thoughts beyond business, they haven’t mentioned them anywhere. So, where should or could I begin? Mom and her love of family security gave me a place to start. Like with all the Kelpie family, my mother’s possessions belonged to them and were inventoried after her demise. (My father died in 1990. He had a heart attack while playing golf.) Those items considered family history are kept in an archive, the rest either put to use or given away. The archive I needed was the main one at the ranch in Pagosa Springs, Archuleta County, Colorado, just a 5-hour drive away from my place. In there would be the diaries from my youth. This was where I would find much of what I thought of as my past.