{"id":49889,"date":"2022-05-05T14:16:07","date_gmt":"2022-05-05T18:16:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thelaurelofasheville.com\/updatestage\/?p=49889"},"modified":"2022-05-05T14:16:07","modified_gmt":"2022-05-05T18:16:07","slug":"from-the-editor-may-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelaurelofasheville.com\/updatestage\/lifestyle\/from-the-editor-may-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Editor: May 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I began work on this issue, I never imagined that, shortly thereafter, I would lose my mother, a guiding, supporting and loving force in my life always, especially when I became a mother myself. The Laurel<\/em> lost a devoted reader, for she was that kind of mother, the one who watches proudly over her children\u2019s lives. When her body began to fail her, she still stacked the latest issues by her chair for the time when she would feel like reading again. And we all thought that day would come.<\/p>\n

\"\"This, my favorite photograph of my mother, shows her as a young, vibrant, beautiful woman\u2014tall, red-haired and green-eyed\u2014gazing upon one of her dreams come true. In the old trunk handed down from her grandmother, we found a list my mother made while still in high school of what she wished for her life. Among the goals written there were \u201cat least three children\u201d and \u201ca nice house.\u201d She did have three children and she always made wherever she lived the most beautiful and welcome of homes, the cozy place where I could come back, sink upon the sofa and breathe a sigh of relief.<\/p>\n

My mother is the reason I love words, reading them and writing them. She read to me before I started school until I realized that letters made words. She bought me books and a typewriter when, at nine, I decided I would become a writer. She helped me go to college and stay there when times were tough. And she set an example for loving the arts.<\/p>\n

Marcel Proust, that great miner of memories, said that in time, after a mother\u2019s death, you \u201cwill gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you.\u201d A mother\u2019s passing, he wrote, means \u201cyou will always keep something broken about you.\u201d Yet, he goes on, \u201cit is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this issue, we feature Brenda Kay Ledford\u2019s new book of poetry, Blanche: Poems of a Blue Ridge Woman<\/em>. The poems, Ledford says, were a way of remembering her mother who grew up in the 1920s and \u201830s in Brasstown. \u201cI wrote the poems because it was a way of working through the grief of Mama\u2019s passing,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

I find myself doing the same, making poems out of memories. Even though Proust promises that I will remember, there seems an urgency to get it all down now, and so I, too, have been writing about my mother while also visiting with my grief.<\/p>\n

The Wilma Dykeman Legacy, ten years old now, seeks to advance Dykeman\u2019s ideals: social justice, environmentalism, and the written and spoken word. \u201cMy mother spent her life trying to grow into her best self,\u201d says Jim Stokely, Legacy president, \u201cand since I\u2019m her son with 50 percent of her genes and her life model to go on, I guess I\u2019m doing the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how mothers stay with us, beside us, even after they are gone. It\u2019s their whispers we hear with our hearts, bidding us to keep going, to continue to dream, to act on our beliefs and to be our best selves.<\/p>\n

Happy Mother\u2019s Day, Mom. And to all the mothers out there.<\/p>\n

Gina Malone can be reached at Gina@thelaurelofasheville.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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