My mom is seventy-three years old, and she still wakes up every single morning at six o’clock sharp. She’s had the same routine for as long as I can remember—the same routine she kept when she worked at the public library for thirty-five years, the same routine she maintained even after she retired. She puts on her face cream, carefully ironing a blouse even if she has absolutely nowhere to go that day, and brews her coffee in that chipped white ceramic pot she’s owned since the 1980s. I’ve offered to buy her a new one at least a dozen times, but she refuses every time.
“This one works just fine,” she always says, running her finger along the familiar crack in the handle. “No need to replace something that still does its job.”
After her coffee is ready, she sits at the kitchen table with her small black notebook—the kind with the cloth cover and the elastic band wrapped around it—and writes down everything she spent money on the previous day. Four dollars and thirty-two cents on milk. Thirty-eight cents for a pack of gum. Two dollars and nineteen cents for a head of lettuce. She notes everything: groceries, prescriptions, the occasional greeting card, even the quarters she puts in the parking meter when she drives to the post office.
She doesn’t complain about keeping track of every penny. She never has. It’s just who she is—careful, methodical, responsible. She raised three kids on a librarian’s salary while my father was deployed overseas more often than he was home. She paid off a mortgage by herself. She put all of us through college with a combination of her savings, our scholarships, and her sheer determination that we’d have better opportunities than she did.
My mother is the kind of woman who shows love through action rather than words. She’s quiet, thoughtful, and almost painfully polite. Which is probably exactly why some people think they can take advantage of her.
When Our Neighbor Asked for Help
Our neighbor Claire lives across the street in a renovated colonial with a perfectly manicured lawn and a white picket fence that looks like it came straight out of a home décor magazine. She’s thirty-six years old and works at some marketing agency downtown—the kind of company that’s always sending her to what she calls “client lunches” and “strategy meetings,”which mysteriously seem to happen during happy hour at trendy bars.
She has a three-year-old daughter named Lily who’s either screaming at the top of her lungs, sleeping, or bouncing off the walls like she’s made of pure energy and chaos. Cute kid, honestly. But exhausting to be around for more than twenty minutes.