Pass, Trash, Givers and Keepers

I'm cleaning out my world.
Or at least, I am trying.
It's overfilled...stuffed... too much.
I need for nothing, want for nothing.
I have all that I want or need and more.
To excess, in fact.
So much that I feel sometimes over-whelmed by it all.
In my cleaning, I am finding things...
things pushed to the side, stuffed in a drawer, tucked in a corner.
Things I really don't need to keep & in hindsight, a lot of it I guess I never did need.

I'm throwing most of it out.
Some of it goes into a pile of 'Maybe someone else will want this.'

One little drawer of my life...
stuffed...

a card of decorative buttons, a half empty battery package, a watch which needs those very batteries installed, a phone number to the long-ago boyfriend of a friend, signed medical releases for a child I once kept, dog tags for a dog now passed, various postcards and stamps, stickers and incense, old coins and a wooden ring, a four leaf clover I found last summer or the summer before, old photographs and a fingernail file, playing dice and a couple screwdrivers, expired vitamins and dirty old marbles from the yard, lotion samples, wooden peace signs... and some

and in the midst of all of this, I found un-opened and surely tucked safely away for later, an envelope post-marked September 10, 2007. In it, a letter from my Mother. Sprawling letters loopity-looping to the right, each word leaning right introducing the next...filling the single sheet of linen, that wrapped itself around a crisp twenty dollar bill.

I tucked the twenty back in the linen and stuffed it back into the envelope....

and put it in the pile I call 'I might need it later' along with my heart-shaped rocks & holey seashells...

'Do you have children?'
'No Ma'am.'
Smiles, 'Oh, well I was going to, uh, wish you a Happy Mothers Day.'
Smile reflected back,'You still can. I have a Mother who's wonderful.'

Mother. Mom. Momma.
Sometimes I call her Mommasita or MotherLove.
I hear one of my older sisters call her Mommy.

Before I began school, I sat at the kitchen table with my best friend and her mother.
My friend called her mother by her proper name and I froze, confused.
'What did you just call your mom?'
'Vicci'
'Why?'
'That is her name'
'She is you Mom.'
'Yeah, but she has a name too.'

Later, I stomped into the kitchen and confronted my own mother.
'Who are you?'
Setting her potato and paring knife down ...'What?'
'I said, who are you?'
Rinsing her hands and looking over her shoulder at me, 'Well, I am your Mother for one thing. What is going on?'
'I know you are my mom. I want to know who you are to everyone else!'

Ah, since then I have learned that my Mother is more than she or I will ever know, more than any name or word could ever communicate. If I grow to be a fraction of what she is, I will be a very content woman.

Happy Mothers Day to my own Mother, to you, to your Mothers and to all the Mothers in the world.