Kim's mother dressed for Mardi Gras a few years ago. A white woman with short blond hair wears a black dress with white scarf and feathered headdress and boa. She has a bird painted on the side of her face and stands in profile smiling.

My Mother’s Stories

Posted on by Kim

I did my best to collect my mother’s stories when she died.

Curating a life in stories, trying to capture the memories, is a chore that many of us find suddenly thrust upon us when a loved one dies. We scramble for photos, often overlooking many as we prepare for a memorial service. But over months, photos trickle in, and we make a patchwork of the memories we share with their other friends and relations. I curated this volume of my mother’s stories and photos shortly after she died in December of 2019 of something that looked a lot like COVID, but of course we didn’t have COVID here then. (Or did we?) The service we had planned for her was to be on Good Friday, 2020. Just after lockdown. So, I had time to work on this volume.

Mom had been sharing short, short stories with me for years. Writing was something we shared. When we talked on the phone she’d scribble down old things I’d remind her of. Then she would write out as much as she could recall of the story and send it back to me. We didn’t capture all the stories I wish we had, but we got a lot of them. I hope she’d be proud of the way my curation of her life turned out, but dang I wish she’d written the one down about getting arrested in Crowley, Louisiana, with four horses in the trailer, or the one about running out of gas in the middle of the night and riding a mare in a rope halter and a shipping blanked up the road with a gas can and a pistol.

These are good stories

My mother was a lifelong storyteller from a long line of people who knew how to tell stories. Not only that, she was wild, and lived adventures all her life–fantastic fuel for stories. She was someone her own mother referred to as a ring-tailed tooter. If you’re from the south, you’ll know that means she was full of piss and vinegar, that she was a real pissant. This memorial volume is not at all maudlin. It’s mostly her own stories and photos compiled. Click the player below to read it. (Or click HERE.)

Coda

There’s a coda to this curation of my mother’s life. I only learned after Mom’s passing that the one story she didn’t tell me was about my older brother. And I found him through the miracle of DNA testing. So, this volume of her stories in her own words turned out to be special, because I was able to introduce my long lost brother to his biological mother.

Here’s a sampling of short things I’ve written that are mostly, sort of true.