The colors of Oklahoma spring

"Southern Oklahoma Springtime," 8 x 10 watercolor, 140 lb. cold press paper

Driving into southern Oklahoma in spring is always an adventure in color for me. The farther south you get, the more green, the more color.

Every Mothers' Day, I see this as I drive down to the Waurika Cemetery to plant flowers at my Mom's grave.

I drive alone, in silence, eyes and ears and imagination open to the landscape, to the colors, to the memories of when we lived in that area.

Long ago, I learned that. Having lived in the northern midwest, in Iowa, you pay more attention to the seasons than here, and appreciate the changes. When we'd drive south to visit family in spring of those years, you could see the landscape green up before your eyes, the father south you went.

You just have to look, to enjoy the rural views, the wide open spaces. The trip to Mom's grave takes time for me to adjust to, so it's been three days since I painted.

But today it came, almost spontaneously. A bright sunshiny day, meant more color just when I needed it. I remember the green fields, the full trees, the hay bales, and especially the wildflowers along the roadsides. And of course, the skies are alive with clouds, and colors too.

Today is a gloomy pandemic day, and that means we need more color than ever. Thus today's landscape, opening my senses to the colors of creation.

Mother's Day coffee, and flowers

Flowers for Mom

I sat down on the grass and had a cup of coffee with my Mother Sunday.
After making my annual Mothers' Day pilgrimage to see her, planting real flowers on her grave stone, washing it off, I got out my thermos, poured a cup, and we talked.
For as long as I knew her, she had always loved coffee, and now that's she's been dead 40 years, it just seemed the natural thing to do.

We talked about my brother and I,  about her grandkids all grown up now, by name, and about her great-grandchildren, who she never got to meet.
The hot coffee was more delicious than ever in the warm sunshine. The faint memories of having coffee with her came back. I wish I'd spent more time drinking coffee with her though.
I've lost track of how many years I've brought flowers to her grave in the Waurika, Oklahoma, cemetery, 120 miles from my home, and it occurred to me  that there will come a time when I'm no longer able to make that trip. 
So I told her that this fall, God willing, I'm going to come down and plant some daffodil bulbs that will come up every spring, after I'm gone. 
But when I come back, we'll have another cup of coffee.

Tomorrow's pilgrimage toward a reunion

They're all gone now--Sissie, ET, Mom, Ima, Addy, Gladys

Francis Faye Culp Clark

June 15, 1909-

July 5, 1980

It's more than two hours southwest and 35 years back in time for me tomorrow. I go to plant real flowers at her grave, and think, remember, talk, and touch mortality. 
Tell your mother you love her.
Brother Jerry and I have mementos and photographs, and more. We have questions and wondering we'll never find out. We have cousins.

Mom with grandchildren Travis, Dallas, Becky, Derrick and Vance

We and our children and our grandchildren carry her genes, her grace and goodness--and her sense of humor.
Mom, you'd delight in our your grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  
I know it's a long way from humble East Texas, but we've all traveled miles and years, and can never thank you enough for your unselfishness, how you cared for and reared us. 

Retirement at MD Anderson

We wish we were as good as you, but any goodness we have we inherited and learned from being around you.   
We look forward to a big reunion. In the meantime, I'll see you tomorrow.

Front row, right corner, on a Ma Bell basketball team

Dad's portrait of his bride, 1943

Somber Sunday

My trip back in time and memories on Mother's Day meets lots of ghosts but not in the cemeteries. But after visiting four cemeteries in two days, I have much to think about, before I write.

Mom's grave on the hill west of Waurika, Oklahoma

Dad's grave at Fairlawn cemetery, next to his father's grave, Erle Thweatt Clark;
Dad's inscription says "His spirit lives in his paintings."

From left, Dad's grave, Erle's grave, and then my great grandparents, Mary Unit Watts and Batte Peterson Clark

Ghost towns

Traveling to Wichita Falls and then Waurika this Mother's Day to visit Mom's grave with my brother Jerry of Lubbock stirs ghosts in those towns and in my life.

We gathered last night for dinner and personal time, in the city where my grandmother on my Dad's side, Cuba John Miller Clark Reasor, had a watermelon stand and restaurant downtown back in the early 50s. I barely remember it, but it was hot then when we visited in the summer. It was already 101 yesterday. That's the city where we drove every week for 12 years to have the newspaper printed when I owned the Waurika, OK, News Democrat 25 years ago.

Crossing the Red River

Jerry and I drove north through Burkburnett, crossing the Red River, and turned east on US 70 toward Waurika and the cemetery where Mom is buried. It's a long 28 miles and it was hot already at 9:30, going into the sun through the rattlesnake-infested Red River breaks, the mesquite, the wheat--land largely unpopulated except by cattle. Years ago, we used to travel that route west going to New Mexico and Texas.

At the windswept hill west of Waurika, we pulled off  the road, crunched over the gravel and drove up by Mom's grave. I've come most years to plant real flowers at the grave, saturating the plot with water and cleaning off the gravestone. This is Jerry's second or third trip. He said he was "going to see Momma."

Jerry at Mom's grave

We planted the flowers, and stood around, talking, to each other, and to her too, remembering, thinking, wondering, about the past and the future, as the wind slowly dried the water off her marker, leaving only the incised letters of her name and her dates of life wet:

Francis Faye Culp Clark

June 15, 1909

July 5, 1980

It's not quite in the cemetery. The wind always blows and you can hear doves and meadowlarks all the time. But we were quiet inside, I think. We wandered around other graves, commenting on the names and the dates. Babies and children, and a lot of people I remember personally having known them or worked with them when we lived there before leaving in 1986. The names themselves are stories, and ghosts. I should have written them down. Maybe someday. Ghosts.

My great partner and wife, Donald J. and Lorene B. Morrison

His meeting me there revived other memories and ghosts. Every year I search for the grave of my former newspaper partner and his wife, Donald J. and Lorene B. Morrison. Never have found it, because I thought it was in an older part  of the cemetery.

Wandering with Jerry, not far from Mom's grave, I found it. More memories and ghosts.

We didn't spend long there, lost in our thoughts and he with a four to four and a half hour drive ahead.  I kneel down and kiss the gravestone and say goodbye.

Jerry asked if I realized that when we're gone, no one will visit those graves. Mortality hangs in the warm air.

Red brick streets

Ghosts of a past life

Then I drive through the little town of Waurika, about half the size of when we lived there...withering like most of the state west of I-35. I can tell you stories about many of the buildings--with the people involved, as I drove up those red brick streets, past the old newspaper office, the railroad depot, vacant store fronts once alive with people and hope. I drove past crowded parking lots of the church were we went, and the one where Mom went. More memories, more ghosts. Took a picture of the first house we had there, when our youngest was born. Drove past the high school, turned north on US 81.

The restored Rock Island Depot--now the library. It was vacant for years.

I stopped to take a photo of vacant buildings in Addington, which had a Socialist newspaper in 1909, and is now barely there. I think most towns have ghosts, but they're easier to find in small towns, rather than metro areas where "progress" erases them.  I pulled into Comanche, 15 miles north of Waurika where my Dad was born, past the boarded up brick school of the Comanche Indians he and his brothers attended.  More ghosts. A new bank building is going up on the corner, replacing the old Chief Cafe where granddad used to sip coffee. Around the block a few cars are in the gravel parking lot of the Comanche Church of Christ where Dad's funeral was.

Terry and Jerry at Mom's grave

North of town I stop on old US 81 and drive up more gravel to plant a few flowers at Dad's grave. He died in 1973. Beside him is the grave of his father, Erle Thweat Clark, who died in 1963. Just north of his grave are two more. Mary Unit Watts Clark, who died in 1926, and Batte Peterson Clark, who died in 1916. My brother and I carry their name and more. Who will visit our graves?

I talk briefly to Dad, and then head north, not stopping in Duncan, because there are ghosts there too. I'm eager to get to Chickasha and the turnpike and head home at 75 mph. Slower speed and memories and ghosts and ghost towns are important

But it's important not to try to live there, or stir them too much.

Mother's Day thoughts

Francis Faye Culp Clark

1909-1980

“Those are Momma’s glasses,” I said to myself.

I was digging through an old box in the garage, rummaging through old letters, faded photographs, artifacts of an earlier time.

There they were--thin gold octagonal wire frames, around slightly scratched bifocals. Beside them was a Mothers Day card colored on torn, faded construction paper by a little boy named Terry. There were yellowed photos of a young woman and friends in flapper dresses, old cars, brittle brown envelopes with three-cent stamps and hand-writing scribbled on them, postmarked in Texas in the 1920s and 30s.

Mom, with her first five grandchildren--Travis, Dallas, Becky, Derrick, Vance

I was sitting on the concrete floor of the garage, trying to straighten up and sort through the boxes one more time...you know, a typical weeknd chore. Among the boxes of junk--junk that is too valuable to be thrown away--were baby pictures, kid pictures, young adult pictures that record the passing of time in individuals, in families.

There are days like that, family reunion days. You sit and visit with people you’ve known for years, watching them grow older. Some with walkers, some with oxygen tubes, kids and grandkids and great grandkids scrambling around, people feasting on a smorgasbord of food and faces and family.

And then you think about them watching you grow older...like the stuff that spills out of an old box. A guest book of a wedding or a funeral, scribbled family history notes with dates of births and marriages and deaths of brothers, sisters, parents, aunts, uncles, children. Tears of memories in small items like a tiny black leather coin purse stuffed with a black and white photo of a young woman, carried by your mother 70 years ago.

Certificates of membership, graceful handwriting you immediately recognize...and the boxes they’re crammed in. Old magazines, newspaper clippings.

My brother Jerry and I at the Culp
reunion a month ago.

A musty smell of growing older, perfumed slices of time frozen in eternity. It brings tears, until you think about your own children growing older, and what they’ll look at and remember some day when they’re sifting through boxes, wondering when certain snapshots were taken, who those other people are. The tears are of sadness and regrets and memories, but not of growing older.

Years and memories are like children, the more you have the fuller your life becomes.

I picked up Momma’s glasses and looked through them briefly, and they gave me a new outlook on all those boxes in our lives.

*My brother Jerry and I will meet at Mom's grave in Waurika, OK.,  tomorrow, plant some real flowers, and remember. It has been so long.

Mothers' Day Memories

Francis Faye Culp Clark

I'm usually on the road on this day every year, traveling south on U.S. 81 to the windswept hilltop cemetery at Waurika, where Mom is buried.

Jerry, Mom and Terry  ready to board the train in Albuquerque

Before I leave, I load a gallon  container of water and a gardening trowel. I stop at a Wal-Mart and buy red and yellow periwinkles or petunias. Once the two  hour trip is finished, I drive through the town where we spent 12 years raising family and running the newspaper, driving past memories, and head west on U.S. 70 to the cemetery, just a few miles north of the Red River and Mom's native Texas. Gravel crunches under the tires as I pull off the pavement and head to her grave.

There are usually birds singing, and the wind is blowing. Sparse Sunday morning traffic whizzes by. I'm usually alone. Plastic flowers and cut flowers adorn many of the graves.

Mom and I talk for a while. I occasionally sit down in the grass and write a letter to her. Then I get the water, the trowel and the flowers from the car, dig a small hole at the top of her gravestone, pour in the water and plant the flowers. Oh, I know they won't last long, but that's ok. She deserves live flowers.

Mom's Southwestern Bell basketball team, 1929. She's front row, right.

Then I pour water on the stone, washing off the dirt. The wind quickly dries the stone off, except for the water in the incised letters of her name and the dates:

Francis Faye Culp Clark

1909 1980

It takes longer to evaporate, like the memories that linger year after year. Mom and I talk some more. Then I wander through the cemetery, recognizing  the names of many of the people I used to work with or know. I come back to Mom's grave, almost all the moisture gone, bend down and kiss her name, say goodbye and start heading north.

I didn't make it this year, but will one weekend soon.

Mom's family...Mom, sister Vera (Sissie), her mother Elizabeth, sister Gladys, brother E.T. in Sissie's Dallas apartment, 1950s.