THE SCARF
“Buying gifts for my mother was always a challenge because she liked to make do with what she had….”
My grandmother was only 16 when she lost her first baby, so when her next baby was born sickly, in 1930, she let her mother-in-law take her. That baby was my mother, and this explains why she spent the first years of her life on a cattle ranch on the outskirts of Livermore, California. She didn’t go back to live with her parents until she was old enough for school, and then only because the road from the ranch to town was unpaved and unreliable in winter.
By this time there were younger siblings; eventually my mother would be the eldest of ten. Her father was an alcoholic who did not work regularly. When he drank, he’d be gone for days. There was never enough to eat. The children took day-old pancakes to school for lunch; when they complained of hunger, they were told to go to sleep. The older children wore other families’ hand-me-downs, which were then handed down again to the younger children. My mother’s lifelong terror of rodents started the day she was trying on clothes from a bag of donations and felt something crawling on her that turned out to be a mouse.
But there were good things in those donation bags, too, and one of the best was a lovely scarf—a beautiful green, the fabric soft against my mother’s cheeks. She loved that scarf. When she told me about it, I could picture how it must have complemented her fair Irish complexion, black hair and light green eyes.
One day on her way to school it began to rain, so she covered her head with the scarf and tied it under her chin. When she got to school and went to take off her wet things, she saw to her horror that green dye from the scarf had run all over her face and neck. It wouldn’t wash off, and she spent the entire day mortified. When she told the story, even years later, the embarrassment of that experience still washed across her face.
The scars of her childhood left my mother very outspoken, judgmental and unforgiving of hurts. She had a hard time showing physical affection, but when I was little she would play Grandma and come visit me and my doll. She was my Girl Scout troop leader when no one else volunteered for the job. She threw parties for our birthdays and made the favors and the cake and organized games for us to play. When I grew up and started working, I’d invite her and my father to come see where I worked. Every time, she would ask me what to wear and ask “Do I look all right?” when she arrived. She always did.
Buying gifts for my mother was always a challenge because she liked to make do with what she had; nice gifts, she’d put away for a special occasion. (She worried about money and paid every bill on time; the day before she died, at 90, she was balancing her checkbook.) But one year while I was out shopping for Mother’s Day, I spotted a beautiful pale gray scarf. It was silky and had a lovely pattern of tiny pink flowers and green leaves. I knew it would complement her now salt-and-pepper hair and feel good against her skin, so I bought it and wrapped it, hoping she would use it and not “put it away for safekeeping.”
When she opened the gift, her face lit up and she held out the scarf to admire it, smiling. From then on, every time we went out when it was cold or wet, she would fold the scarf into a triangle, place it on her head and tie the ends under her chin. She kept it near her favorite coat, which is where I found it after she passed. When she wore the scarf, I could see the beautiful girl she’d been. Now I keep it on a bookshelf, draped around a picture of that girl, safely tucked in where nothing can hurt her.
—Mary Ann Carrasco
Mary Ann Carrasco is retired and lives in Sacramento. She’s a hobbyist photographer, does volunteer work, loves to write and is working on short memoir pieces.