The scene’s seared into my soul. Mother in our kitchen on Choteau Street. She’s leaning up against the counter. I’m trying to visit with her and wrangle a meal. My mind’s in at least two places. It’s the early 1990s and Mother’s macular degeneration is severe. Reality flickers just a bit for her. I ask about how she is managing at home, whether Daddy is helping. I look over to see her crying. I know only to gather her up in my arms—tiny as she is—and ask what’s wrong. She tries to corral her tears and protest that she shouldn’t feel sorry for herself. I ask softly again – and in a rare break from her determined good cheer, I hear her murmur that Daddy isn’t always kind or patient, that he shouts at her.
Thirty years later, I still can’t breathe through the memory.
I should have asked sooner and more often. My dad had talked about how hard it was to take care of Mother on the flight out. I should have seen the evidence. I should . . . . I should . . . . At the end of that visit, I purchased a thousand dollar round trip ticket to fly with them back to Kansas—so that Mother could at least travel peaceably. In Wichita, I delivered them to good friends. And once home, called my sister to talk about how we might create a buffer, an advocate for Mother.
Esther Wilhelmina Pyle was born in 1908, the third child of Milton and Myrtle’s eight. They lived on a rented Iowa farm and Mother remembered tending sheep by herself at five; going to school in a horse-drawn bus; and watching over her younger brothers so that her mother could garden and her stronger sisters could manage the corn-cob burning cook stove. She was the smallest of all the Pyle siblings. And the pluckiest.
Out of Hansell High School at 16 and against many odds, she headed to Manchester College in Indiana, a Church of the Brethren school that she’d learned about in her family’s sporadic attendance at the little local Brethren church. She paid her way by being a nanny and teaching between college semesters. When she graduated she held certificates for home economics, English, music, and art. Which she taught for the next decade in schools throughout Indiana and Ohio.
Those were, I believe, the best years of her life. She lived full on: making the deepest friendships; learning to drive; tending to the appetites and illnesses of her used Model A; painting; playing the piano; traveling cross country; corresponding; treating herself to stylish clothes and hair appointments. She could back up and over muddy hills. Scoot from one rural school to the next. Handle tipsy fourth graders from the southern Indiana hills. Go sight-seeing in her traveling pajamas.
Mother and my dad, Paul Sherfy, met when she went home to visit her Iowa family. At the time, my Grandpa Sherfy served the little Brethren church as minister. I know virtually nothing about my parent’s courtship and have stoutly refused to read their pre-wedding correspondence. By the time they married, my dad was working in McPherson bunking with his parents. Mother’s sister lived 30 miles away in Salina. They were married there in October 1940, made Kansas City their honeymoon destination, and returned to McPherson and a tiny basement apartment likely all too close to the elder Sherfys. My sister Sonja was born in April 1942.
By then my dad had enlisted in the Navy as a noncombatant weatherman at the Naval Base in Olathe, Kansas. And my folks acquired the little bungalow on Marlin Street—although for the life of me I don’t know how. From then, until my dad’s return from his onboard ship duty in the Pacific in early 1946, Mother managed life with a challenging toddler, in-laws, little money, and none of her teaching friends or family.
The only diary of Mother’s that I’ve ever found dates to 1944, a Bremyer Insurance Company giveaway. I’m inclined to picture her lonely in those war-widowed years, but the diary documents the woman I know from my own life. She mowed the yard, sewed for herself and Sonja, made calls for church lunches, socialized with Paul’s friends who were now hers, tended to Grandpa and Grandma Sherfy, baked pies, weeded the asparagus patch, walked downtown for groceries and notions. She admits, in that handful of short entries, only occasionally to “being blue” and “as weepy as the weather.”
Mother was 39 when I was born–right about nine months after my dad returned home. He soon found a job with the Alliance Insurance Companies—a position he would need and hate for thirty years.
For the next 15 years, I took Mother’s prodigious accomplishments and unflagging energy as the norm. She made simple meals–adequate, healthy, quick. She wrangled the heavy Electrolux canister vacuum each Saturday; planted a huge garden at our house and a giant potato patch at Grandma Sherfy’s; ran our laundry through the 1929 Maytag wringer washer and two tubs of rinse water, one with blueing, and then lugged bushel baskets of wet clothes and sheets up to hang outside. She gave us our beginning piano lessons and our stinky Toni home perms; turned to mending in the evening as rest from the day’s work. She picked Grandma Sherfy’s cherry trees, canned and froze what we grew, and the peaches, plums, and apples she bought in bulk. She mixed play dough and created games and art projects. Chauffeured us around town in their single car. Grandma Sherfy and Aunt Mary were standard guests for Sunday dinner and more Sherfys poured in to stay the night and eat when their children arrived at McPherson College. Mother made every dress and skirt and blouse I wore until I graduated from college. Family legend tells of her waiting up until my sister returned home from prom to unstitch Sonja from the dress—having run out of time to sew in the zipper.
And that was just the work for our household. One morning a week, Mother gave over to church quilting and comforter tying. She helped organize the Duo Art Club and often its monthly meetings designed to give housewives a touch of culture and the larger world. She launched the Cottonwood 4-H Club, a town version of 4-H so that Sonja and I and others could learn more than Brownie Scouts offered. Mother took her turn at preparing and serving funeral dinners and wedding receptions and communion suppers. Threw together potato salad or a sour cream cake for ice cream socials. Solicited door-to-door for the heart fund. She was the queen of flannel board stories and hectograph handouts for Sunday School and Bible School classes—the latter always coinciding with Grandma’s cherry crop harvest. For a decade, Mother orchestrated the College’s annual fundraising Booster Banquet—an elegant event that served several hundred people in the town’s Community Center. She sat on the trustee board of the Church’s Cedars retirement home. Spent hours on the phone negotiating with other women for help with those church and community events.
Three or four nights of the week, we hosted the Kellys or the Sundbergs or the Lloyds or the Dreshers or the Yoders or went to visit them. She invited Helen Kubin over to coffee most Monday mornings when both had finished hanging out their wash. Mother arranged the trips we took to see family in Colorado and Iowa and back east. Made the bologna sandwiches and filled the Little Brown Jug thermos needed in those 15 hour days in an un-air-conditioned car. At home, on nights when the heat demanded it or we were restless, she’d convert a hot dog, mashed potato, and fresh green bean supper into a picnic at Lakeside Park.
Somehow, too, Mother – and Daddy as well – fit the culture that McPherson offered into our world. Made music and art and literature and oratory the connective tissue of our lives. Our church college provided opera, choir, and orchestra concerts. The record slots in the 1946 Stromberg Carlson radio-phonograph combo held often-played classical albums. The community 15 miles north produced Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion each Easter. Before we were old enough to try out for a chorus slot, we went to see the upholstered soloists and the orchestra and choir behind them. My folks sought out traveling lecturers and Sunday evening missionary slide programs. Mother tracked the changing art in Brown Auditorium’s gallery. And we attended all these events in our Sunday clothes and good coats.
Mother was 56 when I graduated from high school. For sure in all the whirlwinds of a child’s life and perception, she wasn’t always my heroine. In summer, I was embarrassed by the bright red or gruesome green floppy canvas Ked sandals she wore. Or the worn pinafores. I bridled every time Mother slid around the corner into the living room to correct my piano practice. In high school, I flinched at her good night hugs. I rather shared my dad’s wish that she would get her hair fixed professionally and buy a few more real dresses at Morris & Sons. And his distaste for the ever growing stacks of fabric and 4-H guidelines and church ladies’ programs. I held a grudge from the day before 4-H fair when I carelessly ripped the housecoat I was belatedly sewing. She made me patch the rip as professionally as I could and take my chances. And I wasn’t altogether a fan of her favorite form of discipline: “Mother expects more of her two little girls.”
For almost as long as she lived, I remember Mother drying her hands on her apron, coming from the tiny, awkward kitchen that never got remodeled into the living room, setting the kitchen timer for 15 minutes, lying down on the davenport and hanging her legs over the back. To ease the ache and get a little “shut eye,” she said. I didn’t know much about the pill box in the middle of the kitchen table—just a little something that Dr. Dyck prescribed for the “sick” headaches that Mother got, often when company came for dinner. Phenobarb, I think. Mother read most in the dead of night, Reader’s Digest or the church’s Messenger, when she couldn’t sleep. I was out of college before I understood the price that she paid to accomplish so much and still be the emotional foundation for an anxious, dependent husband, a joyless mother-in-law, an extended family with the usual wrinkles in behavior and manners—and for her children’s needs and deadlines.
The world, though, knew Esther Sherfy by her unflagging cheerfulness and caring. Mother sat down daily to write sympathy and get well notes. After church, she was first to reach out a hand and greet someone who needed a little compassion. To include the shyest or the shunned. When my cousins Gary and Lee came out of the closet, Mother offered nothing but acceptance, even if awkwardly. She was a favorite aunt to our hard-living cousin Barb for that same welcome and absence of judgment. Human, still. I remember the two or three church women for whom she had no patience—they put on airs and didn’t carry their weight.
I am thinking especially tonight of Mother as artist. Her painting of a frothing sea and battered rocks hung gilt-framed above the Stromberg Carlson–our living room centerpiece. Now two oil paintings of hers—autumn scenes–dominate mine. As if the artistry of painting and sewing wasn’t enough, Mother could knit, crochet, embroider. Her fingers knew the intricacies of tatting. She taught those to my daughter. She mailed notecards to friends decorated with pen and ink drawings made three dimensional with tatted flowers or holly sprigs. When she could no longer see, her fingers still remembered the loops and whorls. My linen closet holds a treasure of pillow cases and hand towels edged in tatted lace.
Forever the faithful correspondent as well, Mother wrote us weekly letters from the moments we left McPherson to a few months shy of her death. Half typewritten, half longhand, written at the dining room table or the card table or on a magazine in her lap while she waited for Daddy at a dental appointment. Her notes were filled with news of friends, church politics, Daddy’s work anxieties, flowers in bloom, recipes tried, the sights on Sunday drives, and then always questions about our lives A sheaf of newspaper clippings—linked to what she thought might interest us– slid out of every envelope. Her siblings and my dad’s and her teaching colleagues received similar missives. Every Christmas card included a handwritten note. She illustrated her letters to my daughters—every tenth word or so replaced with a sketch.
When Sonja and I headed off to college and high school, Mother launched the Homemaker’s Club—a dream that she’d held to gather women from low income households, meld them with the churchwomen she knew, try to erase the stigma of poverty, and let members teach each other time and money saving tricks for keeping a healthy household. Mother’s friendships tripled.
Given all I write about the Church of the Brethren’s influence in my life, my friend Rebecca asked if Mother was religious—devout. I hesitated. Mother believed, all right. But bypassed—truly steered well away from– rigidity or showy piety. She believed in the golden rule, in kindness, in caring for the least of these, in using the talents she was given, in offering a soft word, in doing her fair share, in the world’s infinite beauty. She accepted the Church’s admonition against smoking or drinking, but didn’t let that trump friendship.
I am the owner now of two of her notebooks: One filled entirely with uplifting quotations from magazines and newspapers. And the other brown leather three- ring binder holding evidence of what she did and valued: recipes, lists of daily purchases, Booster Banquet suggestions for the following year, Duo Art roll call ideas, more quotations, sketches of clothing, clever crafts. A list of “shut ins” needing visits and a covered dish. Small typed Sunday School programs—mirroring the bulletins used in adult services. Each ending with a “Food for Thought” quotation. From February 24, 1957: “The world is my country; to do good is my religion.” Thomas Paine, and “What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other.” George Elliot.
Mother’s bachelor-girl trunk now lives in my closet too. Consigned to our basement as I grew up and rarely opened, the trunk contained the treasures of her college and teaching life: paintings; paint and charcoal; class notes; musical scores; text and song books; impossibly skinny, short, beaded black dresses; a flapper’s purse; half-begun quilt blocks; photos of her friends; that 1944 diary.
Mother and Daddy enjoyed almost 15 years of pleasant retirement before their health deteriorated. They visited Kansas landmarks. Grandchildren arrived. They flew to Montana and Massachusetts. Daddy took a part-time job that he found satisfying and freeing. Best of all, they had time and money to take Raymond Flory’s cross-country bus trips to places they’d only hoped to go. For Mother, Alaska!
And when the dark house on Ash Street became darker with my dad’s impatience and the macular degeneration that no bravery or optimism could fix, Mother marshalled all the tiny independences that she could. How to fold money so that she would know its denomination, how to fry an egg, how to write with a cardboard guide. She faced her own death, carefully listing her most treasured possessions for Sonja and me. When dementia stole more of her light and life, she endured, frightened, for just a little longer. The memories that brought a flicker of a smile to her haunted face were those of her growing up and teaching years.
Mother died on January 4, 1995, about the time she and Daddy ordinarily turned on the six o’clock evening news. Daddy was reading the newspaper instead. With her last breath, Mother opened her eyes. And I have always hoped that she found herself on a hillside with her sheep or beside a chattering mountain stream or a sunlit Indiana lakeshore. ©
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Mother stays with me – even as I grow so far beyond being her little girl, white-haired now. A phenomenon I once found impossible to believe or picture. She’s at my side when I watch Montana’s mountains rise up in shadows of blue and black and purple. When I admire the perfect cut of a tailored dress. As I weigh the choice between cleaning the bathroom or writing a birthday card. As the orchestral Moldau grows from a first trickle to Prague’s majestic river. And on summer days when enormous puffy clouds give our big sky its infinite depth. Then, I am back in Kansas, with Mother in our backyard, lovely cool pans in our laps as we shell peas, and she recites:
CLOUDS If I had a spoon As tall as the sky I'd dish out the clouds That go slip-sliding by. I'd take them right in And give them to cook And see if they tasted As good as they look. Dorothy Aldis
