Seventy

My mother turned seventy this week, and yesterday we had a party for her at the house, in the backyard, under the maple my father planted the year they moved in.

She didn't want a party. She said so in May, and in June, and twice in July, and then she gave me a list of who to invite, in her best handwriting, with phone numbers. Most of the list was librarians. School librarians from all over the district, retired now, some of whom she's known for forty years. They arrived in twos and threes with casseroles nobody had asked for, and sat in a circle of folding chairs, and within ten minutes they were arguing about a book none of them liked.

Owen carried every one of those chairs up from the basement and set them out, and was then cornered by three librarians who asked what he was reading. He said manuals, mostly. They took this as a challenge. I watched it from the kitchen window and didn't go to help, which he has since raised with me.

Kristin drove up from Minneapolis with her two kids, who were adopted by the librarians on sight and handed books and lemonade and opinions. The younger one sat on the back step for an hour reading something a retired middle school librarian had produced from her purse, as if she'd been carrying it for years in case the right child turned up. She probably had.

There was a cake from the bakery on Fourth Street with "70" on it in blue icing, because my mother said blue. There were no speeches, because she'd forbidden them. When the cake came out she stood up, looked around the yard at all of us, and said, "Thank you all for coming. There's more cake." Then she sat down. It was the best speech I've ever heard.

I gave her a fountain pen with a fat barrel, easier on her hands than the thin ones she's used all her life. She wrote a thank-you note with it before anyone had gone home, to the librarian who'd brought the most casseroles, and handed it to her at the gate.

The last guests left at nine, when the light was going and the mosquitoes came up off the lawn. We sat in the kitchen with the dishes, and she said she'd had a nice time, in the voice of someone who'd had a wonderful time and wasn't going to say so.