11/15/18

The fires in Northern California burned out the town of Paradise. Aptly named it is where many retirees spend their final days. The house my grandfather built with his own hands stands no longer. Just the whiff of memory remains.

My mother grew up in Paradise. Went to school, church, Sunday school. She is still best friends with a girl she met in the church chorus. Bringing them together a few years back – the first they’d seen each other in over 30 years – I was witness to their angelic voices when they abandoned the piano and sheet music and gazed into each others’ eyes and sang the songs they knew by heart and had never forgotten. The looks in their eyes will stay with me forever.

I remember the house on Billy Road from many childhood weekends spent there, playing in the backyard – a kid’s dream – freedom to roam, pretend-drive the abandoned car out back, trees, sheds, sand pit, rabbit hutch, and always a little dog.

The ground, shaded by big pines unable to grow – to my grandmother’s unceasing sadness – anything she could eat or put-up. She grew a rock garden at the foot of those big pines instead. 

The school is gone, the church is gone, and the little house on Billy Road is gone, too.

My grandparents had moved many years before, to be closer to us kids, and mom still lives in that house now, in Oroville, below the Dam. The fertile yard is overgrown with the things my grandmother planted.

My mom turned 83 this year. She’s sharp and spry as ever. When the smoke got so thick and Oroville threatened to burn, she was evacuated to safety by my brother-in-law. After 2 days she could not stand it, sitting idle with so much work to be done at home. So, she and her friend, a fellow RN, drove back to Oroville, their hometown, to volunteer at the evacuation centers. Many elderly people housed there were from assisted living facilities and hospitals. She and her best pals, all of them retired Nurses, went to those centers to give comfort and care to those who had just lost everything. Often overlooked but meaningful, they helped those folks keep a small shred of dignity by assisting them to the restrooms, offering practical care as well as words of encouragement, empathy, and a listening ear.

My mom shines brightest when she’s helping others. She’s from a generation that had to do without. Born in 1935 in Colorado, she’s seen the effects of climate disaster with the Great Dust Bowl which caused her parents to migrate West. She’s lived through wars. The second world war gobbled up her brothers and spit them back out whole, but forever changed. She was married quickly at 24, as unwed mothers were not acceptable in society but she had to drop out of college all the same. She finished a few years later, but that’s a different story.

My Mom is cut from a different cloth. One that’s not made anymore. Hardworking, bill paying, save-to-buy, honest as the day is long. Just like her parents and grandparents before her.

The smoke in her town was off the charts unsafe to breathe. She promised she would wear her face mask but refused to return to safety at my sister’s house, choosing, while she is able, to stay and help others less fortunate.

She personifies to me what it means to be American. Willing to give up her own personal safety and comfort for the good of the whole. Willing to share what little she has with those that have none. Willing to give her time, her hands, her heart, her love to complete strangers in their time of tragedy and need. I wish more Americans were like my mother, Donna Jean Helm Conkright Wells Snow.