My Mother's Apron

My mother, Octavia Jane Dennis Reese died much too young leaving seven people devastated, my father and her six adult children.  Yes, fortunately we were all adults by the time of her death but we still felt we needed her.  She was our advisor, our confidant.

A few weeks after we buried our mother in the family plot beside her parents my sisters and I met to decide what was to become of Mom's personal items - her clothes and jewelry.  Although there really wasn't much to go through it took us most of the day to neatly pack her good clothes in a box so that they could be donated to charity and her older work clothes were trashed.  She had no good jewelry except the simple white gold engagement ring with one small diamond and a matching plain wedding band and the grandmother's ring her children had bought her for Christmas less than a month earlier.  Dad had already given us the good jewelry before the funeral.

That evening Dad and his four girls sat around the kitchen table and told stories; mostly crazy things our mother had done throughout the years raising six wild children.  And of course once again we laughed as Dad told about the time Mom set the decorative grass on fire which got out of control burning his eye lashes and eye brows off. 

During the story telling session we looked around the kitchen imaging Mom standing at the sink washing thousands of dishes while we happily laughed and played cards.  And then someone noticed Mom's old apron hanging on the door of the large walk-in pantry.  Somehow, none of us had the heart to take it or get rid of the old blue flowered apron with red trim.  Oh, the stories that apron could tell.  It wasn't a pretty frilly little apron for show.  That apron was used for canning green beans and tomatoes, for fixing hundreds of meals, for cooking and cleaning and for wiping snotty noses.  She was wearing that apron the last time we saw her alive.

That old apron hung on the pantry door for several years and then during one of my visits I noticed it was no longer there.  Dad must have removed it.  No one asked.  It was time for him to move on.  And he did move on.  Five years after my mother's death he started dating and married a very nice woman.

The death of someone dear to you is extremely difficult and has the tendency to change a person.  When our mother, advisor, confidant, and consular died a part of us died too.  However we learned later that her death changed us.  In our grief we had learned to be wiser and stronger individuals.

I still wonder whatever happened to that apron.