In the sweltering heat of a July morning in 1985, Jackie [my mother], stepped out onto the screened-in porch that dominates the back of her home.
Breakfast, the little she had eaten, felt like a rock in her stomach, and she often gravitated to the healing greens of the backyard when she wasn't feeling well.
As she settled into one of the old cushy chairs she noticed a new rip in the wire mesh down near the floor.
She leaned back and raised her eyes, staring unseeing into the usually-enjoyed twitter-and-flitter shenanigans of birds around the feeder.
But after only a few minutes, an all-too-familiar inner restlessness pried and prodded and pushed until she was sitting on the edge of the seat, and for lack of something to do, she decided to fix the screen.
With another of many sighs that morning, she pulled herself out of the chair and went inside to gather what she needed to patch it until the whole thing could be replaced.
Pulling a small rug over next to the torn wire mesh, she settled onto it with a grunt and soon found the right needle for the tough fishing line she would use.
The tussling and teasing and wild impulses of sundry dogs and cats and kids over the years had created occasionally stunning holes in the screen, the kind that became enshrined in favorite family stories.
This one was merely a "fly door" and would only take a few minutes to repair.
Cutting a small scrap of mesh material to fit, she overlapped it across the tear, but unsteady hands and a sudden round of blinding human tears that never seemed to stop for long lately made the task difficult.
Just days before, her youngest son and his
best buddy, both 21 years old, had died almost instantly in a car accident,
two more July-4th-weekend statistics.
At the moment, Dad was out of the house "on some errands," coping best as men do who cannot openly express their grief, which meant she was alone in the house.
She took a breath, reached for the now threaded needle, and set about the task at hand.
The low placement of the hole made the process awkward, and weaving the needle back and forth
through the stiff mesh challenged her usually saintly patience.
For some reason, the fishing line did not want to cooperate and kept knotting up.
Here was a woman who had sewn enough stitches for family and friends over the decades to loop a path around the moon and back, and yet amazingly, the thread kept knotting up, something that almost never happened to her.
She swiped at the beading moisture on her face. Another snarl bubbled up like a sudden storm cloud, and the more she tried to pull it free, the worse it got.
Another sigh escaped her as she reached for the scissors, thinking to cut her losses and start over.
Suddenly the phone rang.
She jammed the needle securely in the screen by the rip, dropped everything else, and hurried just
a few feet inside the glass-sliding door to grab the wall phone.
Picking up the receiver, she glanced back with consternation at the tangled mess, still as stone for want of a life-renewing October breeze.
Dad was calling to ask what she wanted to do with some of Jimmy's belongings.
Not two minutes later, she returned to the porch.
There before her was the once hopelessly knotted thread and needle -- laid out tangle-free in a straight line across the floor where she had been sewing.
She glanced quickly around the porch, the yard, the neighbors' yards,
expecting to be surprised by a loving neighbor. But no one was there! --unless you count that live-wire hound that owned my parents.
Who could have possibly fixed it? Even if a neighbor had been able to slip in and survey the problem,
heshe would hardly have had time to
disentangle the knot, and surely my mother, or the dog for that matter, would have heard or seen someone on the porch, since the good Samaritan would have been in her direct line of vision while she was on the phone just inside the
glass door.
At first in her benumbed state of the last few days, she simply lapsed into wordless puzzlement, a total blank.
Then, as if she could suddenly feel him standing right beside her and hear his special,
fun-filled laughter, the kind that goes so well with his familiar baseball cap on backwards and teasing, sun-glinted eyes, the thrill of a realization hit her, and she
knew:
Jimmy did it! In spite of his frequent mischief-making, he always did a far better job than any of the rest of us kids to make sure Mom was taken care of.
Like she later said, "That's just like something Jimmy would do."
