We liked watching the creek rise and flood. Behind my friend’s house was a small creek, which we could scramble down to, by descending about a thirty-foot incline, which the mom made easier by setting into the clay-laden soil half-logs that gave us somewhere to step. Only decades later did I understand that I had seen something normal, ordinary. She looked like she was having the life sucked out of her, or like she was a clone, recharging in private. I once walked in on her while she was connected to a breast pump and remain bothered by that visual to this day. Often she sang us songs on the guitar, especially “ Grandma’s Feather Bed.” She taught us how to use calligraphy pens, she played the piano, she made us drink a full glass of milk with dinner, she led grace. This mom of my friend had an easy laugh and seemed always cheerful, and I have only one memory of her ever disciplining us, when we had once again covered up the floor heating vent with toys, which maybe was a fire risk, I’m not sure. Maybe she wasn’t too unwell, as she did babysit us sometimes, and feed us chicken with canned pineapple for dinner. I didn’t quite understand it at the time, but I know now that the mother in Pink was not mentally well. She, the mom, taught us how to paint Bob Ross style, she read to us serially from the Little House on the Prairie books, she built us a sandbox, she let us run (or feel like we were running) the garage sale in which we sold her wedding dress and her antique dishware, and on a number of weekends she brought us along to go and visit her own mother, who lived in an unincorporated township called Pink, Oklahoma, where she, the mom’s mom, had what I recall as an oversized barn of sorts-today it would feel like high-end loft living, but at the time it had more of the joys of sleeping with goats. When I was in elementary school one of my best friends lived across the street, which is to say also that my best friend’s mom lived across the street. We have so many parents in addition to our own, if we’re lucky.
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