Where She Will Always Be

By Libby Ludlow

My mom was an architect before women were architects. The sole woman in lecture halls of men. Pencil tracing straight edges, sliding along aluminum scales — her measured late-night shapes spilled onto scrolls of thin paper. A brilliant collision of engineering and art. Each line she scratched, talent brimmed. Propping up her future, drawing her dreams.

By the time I came along, her drafting table was dormant. Three kids — too many carpools to drive, too many groceries to get.

Priorities.

When computers whisked architecture into a new era, my mom was volunteering at walk-a-thons, and scrubbing grass stains out of jerseys, not bellied up to a screen.

As fast as her children grew, my mom’s profession changed, too. Eventually, my brothers and I left and she tried to catch up. Her interest ended when the course did. Plastic keyboards cannot compare to a black pen and T-square.

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Christmastime is a pilgrimage to the place of my childhood. Teeming with memories and familiarity. A return to where I began.

When I walk inside my childhood home, I step inside my mom. White walls and wood beams bear her vision. Windows and hallways reveal her world.

The house has gravitas. A damp gray masterpiece of fir and windows. Three stories of soul, flanked by green giants dripping needles year-round.

Once there were forts amongst the trees, Big Wheel tricycles barreling down the driveway, and hidden paths through ivy to neighboring property where we were never invited to explore, but did anyway.

Now my children sit on the floor where I did decades ago tearing paper off gifts. And like every year I’ve known, a Christmas tree stands adorned with wood ornaments skillfully painted by my mom – another thing this world knows only because she created it.

Skylights usher natural light inside. Beams glancing off glass, wood, tile, steel. The calculated lines and angles, somehow warm. Offering the light an impossibly soft landing. An intentional, tender welcome.

In the living room, the worn wood floor expands into a wall of windows. A grand grid of glass framed by wood sills. Putting nature on display, suggesting the most beautiful things to see aren’t inside walls.

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My mom is with us, but she’s not. Her wheelchair is heavy with inertia, her hunched shoulders fill my hug. When I hold her clamped hands, her pillowy veins feel cool under my palm. As quickly as recognition enters her eyes, it flickers back out. For over ten years, she’s seeped away slowly—her body is here, but the woman I know departed long ago.

She lives on the fourth floor in a building brown and beige. Colonial pillars and curved moulding clog clean corners – not my mom’s aesthetic, but the care is good, and sometimes what once mattered just doesn’t anymore.

In her world of hushed hallways, my mom doesn’t know that two miles away, her masterpiece in the trees echoes with the sound of her grandchildren laughing.

The house still holds her, even if her body doesn’t.

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At the elbow of the driveway where pavement meets earth, a solitary Douglas fir soars. Unpretentious and strong. Yearning for light. Its mature branches drape like a ragged petticoat, sagging with decades of gravity and rain.

I remember a time when this old soul didn’t touch the sky. One Christmas when, like a teenager, it perched awkwardly indoors. Boxes and bows huddled under its perky pine canopy, a festive display of ornaments and lights.

But when the gifts were gone, and the year became new, my parents – young and frugal, but rich with energy – heaved the tree out the front door, heavy-bound root ball and all, into the misty winter air.

Up the hill, they tossed shovelfuls of dirt aside and settled the spry tree snuggly into the soil. With one slash of twine, the burlap sack spat. An eager release of gnarled roots.

Now today – from eighty feet high, into the soil deep below, the tree pushes and stretches. A sprawling lattice of roots penetrates dank dirt. The crooked network grows and grows because it knows the wind will come, and you can never be too sure.

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As true as the right angles of the house I call home standing stout on a hillside of loam, my mom’s masterpiece is laden with more than just memories. It is imbued with spirit and meaning as material as a thick web of roots, as alive as a childhood ride on my mom’s bouncing knee. A relic of her talent. A token of her taste. A silent monument to sacrific, creativity…love.

My mom’s presence hangs in the open spaces. Rests in the solid forms. A container of memories. A vessel for the future. An extension of her—so full of life.

My mom’s not here, but we all know, she never left.

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Libby Ludlow is an avid writer, essayist, and poet best known for her award-winning children’s books A-B-SKIS and GOODNIGHT CHAIRLIFT. When she’s not running her small business or chasing after her young children, Libby can be found exploring the Wasatch mountains on skis or by bike. You can learn more about Libby at libbyludlow.com