Mother's Day, at home

I flew home to Duluth on Friday for Mother's Day and came back this afternoon, which is the kind of trip that costs more in airports than it gives you in hours. It was worth it. It always is, and every time I'm surprised.

The house needs a roof. I knew this the way you know things from a distance: my mother had mentioned it twice in letters, each time at the end of a paragraph about something else. Up close it's plainer. The shingles on the lake side have curled like old paperbacks, and there's a stain on the ceiling of the spare room that she has decided is the shape of Lake Superior and therefore not urgent. A man came to look on Saturday morning. He stood in the yard with his hands on his hips for a long time, which is never good, and then named a number that my mother received with the face she used to give students who brought books back with jam in them.

We did the usual things. Breakfast at the kitchen table, which she still sets with a cloth on Sundays. A walk down to the lake, which was gray and enormous and about thirty-five degrees, and which I touched, because I always touch it. The lilacs on her street are all tight bud and promise. In Seattle they've been and gone.

On Saturday night, while we did the dishes, she started talking about the spare room. The one with the stain. She said it seemed a waste, a whole room with nobody in it, and that she'd been thinking of clearing out the boxes and moving the good bed in there. I asked who for. She said she didn't know, it was only a thought, a room ought to have a bed in it. Then she handed me a plate to dry and went back to the roof.

My mother has never said anything by accident in her life. She was a school librarian for thirty-four years. She can find anything, and she can put a thing exactly where you'll come across it.

I didn't answer her. I'm not sure there was a question. But I thought about that room on the plane, all the way over the Rockies, and I'm thinking about it now.

What does your mother say that isn't quite the thing she's saying?