Guest Column: An Early Valentine to My Mom

Dear Mom, I am sending you an early Valentine, because it is late January and we don’t know for sure that you will be here on Valentine’s Day. ALS is taking your breath, but not your spirit. It is taking your body, but not your mind. So I write this Valentine to you now.

I recall to you the springtime, when you sewed beautiful dresses for us to wear to church on Easter Sunday. Four little girls in the same dress, different sizes, different pastel colors. Our one little brother in a homemade three-piece outfit. All of us hyped on candy from the woven basket lined with plastic green grass that had been set out on the table that morning.

Spring also meant that we could play outdoors after feeling cooped up during the winter. We only had three channels on the TV back then with an old antenna on the roof. Sometimes the reception would go out and you said that was the TV’s way of telling us it was time to go and play outside. And anytime we got too full of energy you’d make us run around the house five times before we could come back in.

And do you remember the April Fool’s Day when Dad really had you going, coming in from the barn pretending he had a rusty nail in his foot? 

I sing to you of summer. We would swim in the river and we had to wear old tennis shoes in the water because of all the sharp mussel shells. When we moved up on the hill to the wooded property, we played outside from dusk until dawn, and you called us back to the house by whistling the distinct whistles that were our second names.  

Summers were also full of preparation for the Southwest Washington Fair. 4-H leader extraordinaire, we sat at a sewing machine with you from an early age. Cooking, too, and I am so grateful to be a working woman who can cook dinners and whip up a batch of frosting from scratch, the latter causing one of my girlfriends to look at me like I was magical. Decades of teaching sewing, cooking and knitting to others means that there are scores of people out there carrying your skills into the 21st century.

I remember with you the fall, when you sent us back to school in outfits sewn with that first day in mind. School came easy to me because your own love of reading permeated the house like a second source of oxygen, ever-present and just as necessary to sustain life.  

When Halloween arrived, white sheets become black fabric for a witch’s costume thanks to a box of dye, and we trick-or-treated by car, since neighbors were spread out when we lived in the valley. An old record set on the slowest speed, next to the attic window above the front door, made spooky sounds to greet our own trick-or-treaters.  And there was the one Halloween when we got home from trick-or-treating to find a bat flying around inside the house.

For my birthday in November you made cakes every year. You made my favorite one when I was about 7 or 8. It had a doll in the middle and the cake was her dress, sloping up over her legs and to her middle. You had shaved large gumdrops into rose petals on the sides, and I ate those petals long after they had gone stale. 

I celebrate with you our Christmases. As a stay-at-home mom of five kids, the family budget didn’t allow for extravagant spending, Santa or not. You would stay up late into the night sewing clothes and little gifts for us to go along with the few store-bought items we received, and the gifts were all laid out in sections for each of us on Christmas morning. No need to say which gifts were for which kid. We always knew.

ALS has taken away the sewing, the cooking, the reading, the outward expressions of your love, but not the source. And your love shines on in my own child’s eyes. I write this Valentine to you now because soon we will not see you. But you will always be here.

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Catherine Forte is the oldest daughter of Patricia Sabin of Adna and the late Kenneth Sabin. She lives in Lakewood. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease, also commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.