13 January ...

Today I finished putting my altar back together; it had been relegated to boxes the past 6 weeks to make space for my holiday decor. I have an altar because my mother had an altar. Hers was a shelf in our floor-to-ceiling living room bookcase and while it did have several religious pieces, it also had a variety of other mementos. Sometimes I would ask her to re-tell the stories of where different items had come from. Many of her favorites were the ones brought back to her by my dad from his business trips. My memory will not do my bidding to recreate that still-life arrangement in my mind's eye. I can so clearly picture myself standing next to it, picking up different trinkets, remembering as she remembered. But the specifics are mostly lost. I do know one figurine for sure, because my sister gifted him to me this Christmas. A tiny gray porcelain donkey. As soon as I unwrapped him, I could picture him on the shelf, although his origin I do not recall.

And now he is on my altar. He is nestled in with the rest of the animals standing vigil with Kateri Tekakwitha, my Confirmation saint, and the first Indigenous North American to be canonized, although she was only "Blessed" when I chose her. She is also a connection to my mother. Some of the images I have of her on my altar come from my childhood home, although not my mother's altar. Kateri Tekakwitha kept my mother company in the kitchen. I had gotten her a book about Tekakwitha's life and it stayed on the kitchen table, often with a vase of whatever flowers were blooming in the yard. It is because of my mom, at least in part, that I chose Tekakwitha. I was always fascinated by Indians (as we still called them then). As a young child, I believed my mom must be part Indian. She got so tan in her beloved sunshine, and she had long brown hair and high cheek bones. What I don't remember is whether I liked Indians just because I thought my mom was one, or if I wanted to think my mom was one because I liked Indians (I knew full well we were pretty much Germanic through and through). Indian ponies no doubt played a part in this, horse crazy girl that I was. But either way, once I picked Kateri Tekakwitha, my mom kind of picked her too.

Every time I have to reconstruct my altar I touch each piece, of course, but not always with focused attention. Today's recreation was more mindful, in part because I had things to add, and wanted to reaffirm that each artifact still belonged, still mattered. There is one treasure that will always belong, the most cherished relic in the shrine, and so I didn't have to give it any thought. But today I picked it up and really looked at it for the first time in maybe years. And in an instant I was weeping tears of longing for my mother. There is no way to fully convey in words the tenderheartedness and love that was in my mother, but it is embodied in every facet of the object I held: a handmade college graduation gift. It is my mother in its utterly practical use of a plastic yogurt cup cover, expiration date clearly visible, as its base. It is my mother in its equally practical but amazingly creative use of a broken egg shell, on which she had glued strips of paper with the date, a hand-drawn Notre Dame logo, and my name. It is my mother in the clever, whimsical rolled up diploma she carefully placed inside. It is my mother in the the embellishments of ribbon and yarn. It is perfection. It is perfection.

It is also my mother in its fragility. Egg shells when intact are remarkably strong, if pressure is applied only at the ends, as it is with eggs in the nest being incubated. But other forces break them easily. And this egg was already broken when my mother chose it as her canvas.  And my mother, strong in ways I'll never comprehend, was also fragile, and pressures I will also never comprehend cracked and then one day crushed her.

But not the day she made me that gift. That day, the broken egg was the latest example of a creative genius that also escapes my understanding, but always captured my awe. Ask any of my siblings about the delights they received when our mother got them as her Secret Kris Kringle for the Advent season. Each creation, like my egg, conjured from the items of a housewife's daily life, transformed into magic. Oh, to find one on your pillow after school was an incomparable joy. And my graduation egg. KK enchantment in May.

And so it has traveled with me this quarter of a century. And the years and eight moves have taken their toll. The shell has broken, little by little, and is mostly collapsed. Today, when the weeping stopped, I tried to see what pieces go together still, but too much has disintegrated. And so I gently piled the smaller bits together, and propped the surviving part on top, and slid the diploma back into place. All the while admonishing myself for risking further damage by touching it at all. And back onto the altar it was carefully placed. My mother's beauty. My mother's love. My mother. My heart. And I am full and I am empty. And I am blessed beyond measure.