This Night

It was a dark evening. My mother and I were making the drive out to our home. We’d moved outside of the city I grew up in, to a small town. I couldn’t stand the small town and the impenetrable clicks of the farm kids, who’d known each other since birth. In my view, the tiny town was narrow-minded, unresponsive to the modern world and out of touch. I had heard a rumor that an African-American family had once lived in this town and had been run out. I wasn’t sure if the rumor was true or not, but I guessed it was true, given that I had my own experiences with the harsh rejection from the town’s kids.
I’d come to hate the town, perhaps because I felt it rejected me, perhaps because I had loved the city I grew up in and wanted to return to it. I was thirteen.

But on this night, however, the town was not on my mind. My mother and I often tried to come up with ways to entertain ourselves on the long drive home. On this night, we sang. My mother’s soprano voice rose. My own voice (that of an alto) rose to meet my mother’s, then dropped slightly and paired with hers to produce a beautiful harmony. We sang Irish folk songs that my grandparents had sung. Every so often, we hit a note that needed a slight re-adjustment, paused to re-adjust, and then moved along in the melody. Occasionally we stopped to laugh at our mistakes or maybe just because we were happy. We ended another song in perfect harmony. I smiled, proud of our collective accomplishment. I thought of my grandfather, who’d sung many of these songs to me when I was a toddler. I thought of my grandparents looking down on my mother and I. On this night, my mother was calm, loving, caring and fun. On this night, I was a child.

This is one of the happier memories I have with my mother.