The Last Time I Ever Saw Mom

When Mom was a little girl growing up in Moonshine Prairie, her folks would stop the buggy on the way home from church to let her pick sweet williams. And from the time I heard her tell the story when I was a kid, I made sure that she had a nice big bouquet of the phlox she called sweet williams, every single Mother’s Day.

When the day came that Carol and I had to go west to spend our time teaching on the reservations, I was no longer able to give Mom her flowers. We climbed Peacock Peak one Mother’s Day, and near the top in a grove of Piñon Pine, we found some kind of white phlox growing which was much smaller than sweet williams. I wanted to pick them and somehow send them to Mom, but there was no way we would ever have been able to climb back down the mountain with them.

One summer when we were back home, Mom’s hip broke and she fell. After a spell in the hospital, we took her out to my sister Joan’s in North Carolina and got teaching jobs. The teaching jobs didn’t work very well. My school decided to teach all year, which would have crippled our writing, and Carol had a childish buffoon for a principal who was determined to make life hell for anyone with the nerve to come from Arizona. We made it until December and then found jobs on the Navajo res in New Mexico.

We had just announced our decision to move back west, and were going to leave in the morning. Joan and I were sitting at the kitchen table, playing our fiddles. Mom announced that it was her bedtime and began shuffling out with her walker. Just after she had navigated between Joan and the refrigerator, she paused and turned to me. “Well, I guess this the last I’ll ever see you,” she said serenely.

“Mom!” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous. We’ll be back this next summer.”

We had just gotten moved when Joan rang us with the news that Mom was gone. The thing that came to mind when I hung up the phone was remembering Mom taking the time out of her hectic spring day to walk a mile down into the woods with me to see an ovenbird’s nest. This May will be the first chance I’ve had in all these years to go to the woods for sweet williams. I reckon I’ll leave a handful on her grave.

Tom Phipps

The Brown Recluse and the Old Woman Who Knows

Ten years ago, Carol and I lived in an aging trailer on the Navajo Nation in the sagebrush outside Twin Lakes, New Mexico. One evening after a rough day of teaching, I came home to be reminded that Carol would be at a teacher’s meeting until dark. Since I had the time, I took a hot shower and found that I had crushed a brown recluse spider in my towel. I didn’t have a bite anywhere that I could tell, so I gave a shrug and started to get dressed.

By the time I had my clothes on, I had a fiery pain in my left knee. I dropped my breeches and had a look. I saw no sign of a bite, but my kneecap itched and felt fevered, and the pain in my knee was quickly becoming hard to bear. I filled the tub with hot water and sat in it for a good long while. When I walked Carol home after her meeting, I was in such pain that the best I could do was hobble. When we got home, I remembered that Microhydrin had completely eliminated the pain and swelling from a bark scorpion sting, so I took six of them.

The next day I was greatly improved, but I limped all day. My principal, a Navajo lady who had spent her life around such spiders, told me to try a poultice of Chee dirt, the reddest dirt to be found in the bluff faces in those parts. “If that doesn’t do it,” she said, “try the flea market.”

I was much better by the weekend, but my knee joint was still painful to use, and I now had a half ping-pong ball sort of pocket full of fluid, right on the face of my knee cap, so Carol and I went wandering about inquiring at the Saturday morning Gallup flea market. We were quickly directed to “the old woman who knows,” who turned out to be an old blind woman sitting at a table, who knew not one word of English. With the help of onlookers to translate, she sold us a bundle of herbs and told us how to make poultices from it to keep wrapped to my knee.

My dichotomous keys were all back in Illinois, so I was never certain, but I think she may have sold us a generous wad of sage and lavender, which I dutifully applied. By the next weekend, her herbs had indeed done away with the pain, but I still have the pocket of fluid on my knee cap to this day.

A few months later, I was bitten on the elbow. This time, I immediately commenced taking six Microhydrin every twelve hours for four days and keeping strong magnets wrapped about the joint with elastic bandage to keep the capillary beds open. It started out every bit as painful as my knee had been. In four days though, there was no trace of anything at all, not even a pocket of fluid.

So please tell us what adventures you’ve had with venomous spiders and the like.

Tom Phipps

Fun at the Ostrich Farm

When Tom and I were both teaching and living on the Navajo Reservation near Gallup, New Mexico we liked to visit an Ostrich farm just east of Holbrook, Arizona where you could feed the ostriches. It was fun to watch the huge birds all run to the fence to try to be the first ones to get the feed, which they really seemed to love.

There were several methods you could use to feed the giant birds. One way was to use the large PVC pipes in the fencing which were provided for that purpose. They made dandy chutes for the feed which ended up in troughs at the end of the pipe where the birds could easily eat it.

Of course, if you are anxious to attract the birds you could always bypass the chutes and just dump the feed over the fence. (Not the best choice).

If you are tall like Tom, you can simply hold the cup of feed up at the top of the fence for a more up close and personal experience. (Not advisable for the timid or anyone who doesn’t have a firm grip. The birds are most enthusiastic and can grab the cup from your hand or knock it from your grasp).