Visiting the Town Where My Mother Grew Up

This summer, I drove my mother, who is eighty, back to the little town in Kansas where she grew up. She hadn't been there in fifty years.

She directed me down every street from memory. "That's where the soda fountain was." "That's my old school; it's a library now." "That's where I fell off my bike and broke my arm in 1953."

We found her childhood house. It's painted yellow now. The woman who lives there saw us standing on the sidewalk and came out to ask if she could help. When my mother explained, the woman invited us in for iced tea and let her walk through every room.

My mother stood in her old bedroom and looked out the window for a long time. "Same tree," she said. "It's bigger." Then she laughed. "So am I." We drove home with a jar of the woman's peach jam and my mother humming the whole way.