crossed his mind. After she saw him eat his breakfast, she would tidy up his room, put his dirty clothes and bath towel in a bag to be taken home and washed; she would empty the pan that contained his urine, she would rub cream into the parched skin on his arms and legs, she would comb his hair as best she could. My mother loves her children, I want to say, in her way! And that is very true, she loves us in her way. It is her way. It never has occurred to her that her way of loving us might not be the best thing for us. It has never occurred to her that her way of loving us might have served her better than it served us. And why should it? Perhaps all love is self-serving. I do not know, I do not know. She loves and understands us when we are weak and helpless and need her. My own powerful memories of her revolve around her bathing and feeding me. When I was a very small child and my nose would become clogged up with mucus, the result of a cold, she would place her mouth over my nose and draw the mucus into her own mouth and then spit it out; when I was a very small child and did not like to eat food, complaining that chewing was tiring, she would chew my food in her own mouth and, after it was properly softened, place it in mine. Her love for her children when they are children is spectacular, unequaled I am sure in the history of a motherâs love. It is when her children are trying to be grown-up peopleâadultsâthat her mechanism for loving them falls apart; it is when they are living in a cold apartment in New York, hungry and penniless because they have decided to be a writer, writing to her, seeking sympathy, a word of encouragement, love, that her mechanism for loving falls apart. Her reply to one of her children who found herself in such a predicament was âIt serves you right, you are always trying to do things you know you canât do.â Those were her words exactly. All the same, her love, if we are dying, or if we are in jail, is so wonderful, a great fortune, and we are lucky to have it. My brother was dying; he needed her just then.
In his overbearingly charming reminiscence of how he became a gardener, Russell Page writes:
When I was a child there was a market each Friday in the old Palladian butter market near the Stonebow in Lincoln. The farmersâ wives would drive in early in the morning, dressed in their best, with baskets of fresh butter, chickens, ducks and bunches of freshly picked mint and sage. I used often to be taken there by my grandfatherâs housekeeper while she made her purchases, and I remember that always, in the spring, there would be bunches of double mauve primroses and of the heavenly scented Daphne mezereum. Later when my passion for gardening developed I wanted these plants but could never find them in our friendsâ gardens. They seemed to grow only in cottage gardens in hamlets lost among the fields and woods. I gradually came to know the cottagers and their gardens for miles around, for these country folk had a knack with plants. Kitchen windows were full of pots with cascades of Campanula isophylla, geraniums, fuchsias and begonias all grown from slips. I would be given cuttings from old-fashioned pinks and roses which were not to be found in any catalogue, and seedlings from plants brought home perhaps by a sailor cousinâhere was a whole world of modest flower addicts.
What would my brother say were he to be asked how he became interested in growing things? He saw our mother doing it. What else? This is what my family, the people I grew up with, hate about me. I always say, Do you remember? There are twelve banana plants in the back of his little house now, but years ago, when I first noticed his interest in growing things, there was only one. I asked my mother how there came to be twelve, because I am not familiar with the habits of this plant. She said, âWellâ¦â and then something else happened, a dog she had adopted was about
A. A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)