Following Mom

I'm having my English 101 students write descriptive essays next week. They are supposed to describe a family member, and in doing so, their descriptions should explain more about their family and about themselves. I am one of those teachers who would never make an assignment that I couldn't do myself, so I sat down today to write my own descriptive essay. I'll be posting this one as an example on my class blog http://olympicenglish101.blogspot.com/ next week, but I'm giving it a trial run here. Let me know what you think. Does it accomplish the goal? In describing one person in detail, does it also provide a little something more about the family?

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She is a very pretty lady with cornflower blue eyes and blond hair naturally highlighted with streaks of silver. She smiles and her face lights up with a joy that is contagious. Her last birthday, in August, celebrated 62 years of life. She is a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a sister, a daughter, a friend. She taught second graders to love Beverly Cleary and to write in curly-cue cursive for twenty-five years. She was always that teacher who wore the shirt embroidered with scarecrows in the fall, the vest embroidered with Santas in the winter, and the earrings with tiny flowers on them in the spring.

Today my mother wakes up and rubs her eyes against the harsh morning light. She walks to the kitchen by sheer force of habit. My dad, her husband of forty years, meets her there and hands her a handful of pills, some small and in varying shades of pastel, a few that are large and beige. She smiles at him, kisses him good-morning, and swallows her pills with the cup of water that he hands her. Then she stands in the middle of her cheerful kitchen and looks out the window. She stands there until her husband hands her a cup of coffee and leads her by the hand to the kitchen table where he has placed a bowl Raisin Bran, because she loves raisins.

After breakfast she carries her dishes to the sink but she can’t figure out how to turn on the water. She fiddles with the faucet for a few moments, twisting, turning, pushing. Like magic, the water begins to flow and she rinses her dishes with hands that are bare. Suddenly she realizes her hands are bare. She leaves the water running and goes in search of her wedding band.

Her husband comes in from a quick trip to the garbage can and finds the sink filling up with water. He shuts off the flow and goes in search of her. He finds her in their bedroom. She’s sitting on the bed wearing a shirt but no pants, and yet she’s trying to figure out how to put on her shoes. She keeps putting her left foot into the right shoe. Over and over… and over again she puts the wrong foot into the wrong shoe. He rummages through her closet until he finds some navy blue slacks and then helps her get them on and buttoned before slipping her shoes onto the right feet. The shoes are red leather, her favorite.

Later she stands in front of the mirror in her bathroom and combs through her silvery hair. She suddenly notices that her left hand is bare and, hair brush in hand, she goes in search of her wedding band.

Her husband finds a hair brush in the kitchen sink. He stands at the sink and looks out into the backyard where she is pulling up clumps of weeds from around the old storage shed. He watches, making sure she doesn’t wander too far away. She pulls and tugs for awhile and then carries her scraps to the garbage can behind the house.

A few minutes later she walks back into the kitchen wearing only one red shoe. The other foot is bare, except for the dirt and grass clinging to her unpainted toes. He raises his eyebrows at her but wordlessly walks outdoors and searches the grass for the shoe. He finds it near the garbage can and carries it back to the house.

He finds her on hands and knees with an old dishtowel wiping up the muddy footprints from her blue and white checkered kitchen floor. She says indignantly, “Someone tracked mud right through the kitchen!” She doesn’t notice that her left foot bears the damning evidence. He doesn’t point it out to her.

Later they sit together in the living room and spoon up the potato soup that he made for lunch. Again she notices her bare left hand and says to him, “Oh no! Where is my wedding ring?” He reaches over and pats her on the hand and says, “Remember, Honey? We took it to the jeweler last week to have the setting re-done. One of the diamonds was loose.” She nods her head that she does remember, and they continue to watch the noon-time news.

Minutes later she says again, “Where is my wedding ring? I’ve been looking for it all day!”

And he answers, “Remember, Hon? We took it to the jeweler.”