THE TRIO OF OWLS

Mom loved owls, though not in a collection-of-500-owl-shaped-salt-and-pepper-shakers way.

My mother was 17 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and the beginning of war meant the end of her formal education. As our country took up arms, she took up bookkeeping at her father's buttonhole factory in South Philadelphia. There, dozens of Italian immigrant women sewed military jackets for the flood of soldiers heading overseas, and it was Mom's job to calculate their pay based on the number of pockets, sleeves and darts they completed each shift. 

Because she never finished high school, Mom didn't consider herself smart—that was an adjective she reserved for my scientist father, my three brainiac older brothers and me. But she was so much more than smart—she was wise. She listened at least twice as much as she spoke. After my father died, she worked out long-term investment strategies. When, a mere 13 days before my big Italian wedding, I told her I'd called the whole thing off, she asked, “Would you have the same kind of relationship your father and I did?” and when I replied “No,” she simply said, “Well let's start making phone calls.”

Apropos of her wisdom, Mom loved owls, though not in a collection-of-500-owl-shaped-salt-and-pepper-shakers way. She'd stop in the middle of washing dinner dishes if she heard the hoot of an owl in our backyard, closing her eyes as if she were listening to a Sergio Franchi record. In a gift shop, she’d pause at an owl coffee mug or potholder—Isn't that adorable?—but she knew what it had taken for the women in the buttonhole factory to earn 25 cents a day, and paying three dollars for something she didn’t need was, to her mind, frivolous. 

When I spotted these tiny ceramic owls in a kiosk at the Springfield Mall in 1976, I saved my allowance for weeks to buy them for Mother’s Day. The grouping was perfect—just Momma Owl, Poppa Owl and Baby Girl Owl, no rowdy brothers to spoil the love trio—and oh, how happy the owls made Mom! They lived on the corner display shelf in her kitchen, cozy and just so—until the rainy day when my brothers and I were playing a vigorous game of Nerf ball keep-away and I flung an errant arm. Baby Girl Owl took flight and crashed hard into the linoleum floor.

I don’t recall if it was Mom or I who took it worse, that hollow patch of owl head she tried to fill with strands of Super Glue. Afterwards, she placed the owls farther back on their shelf, out of harm’s way. And there they sat, watching as she made countless pans of shrimp scampi, meatballs from her own mother's recipe card, her famous sautéed mushrooms with mystery spices measured in the palm of her hand. 

Once, in her 70s, on a church trip to Ellis Island, my mother lingered so long over the exhibits that she missed the bus home and had to make her way back to the Philadelphia suburbs via train, bus and cab. When she sat at the kitchen table telling this story, she laughed so hard, you could see her molars. Her hands slapping the table. Her table in the center of her kitchen. That kitchen central to her life. Even after all us kids had left the nest, she reigned there another 30 years with the owls to keep her company.  

Almost four decades after I gave Mom these little owls, she lay in her bedroom for a month, preparing to die. There were 1,200 square feet of accumulated possessions, 90 years of a rich, wise life. “Take just three things,” the hospice nurse advised me, and I thought, Well that’s easy.

—Michele Finn Johnson

Michelina Cilea at her post at the South Philadelphia Buttonhole Factory, sometime in the 1940s.

---

Michele Finn Johnson is a Tucson writer. Her short-story collection, Development Times Vary, was published in 2022 by Moon City Press.

---

Have a story to share? Please see the complete submission guidelines, including photo guidelines, at TheKeepthings.com.

---