Pennsylvania Game News - March 2010 - 51

brother and me, and her love was bedrock for us. Whatever we did had importance to her because it was important to us. Whatever we valued was precious to her because of us. It needed no other relevance or worth. After my husband, Mom was the first person I’d tell about my successes. And that included my hunting successes. “Mom, I got a buck!” was met with the same enthusiasm as when I told her, “Mom, I won a national writing award!” It was all the same to her. Her daughter was happy and that made her happy; the details of that happiness didn’t matter. That something had brought a smile to “her little girl’s” face, even though that face has taken on some lines of its own, was enough for Mom. If the hunting season became busy and I didn’t call until some days after I’d filled my tag, I always heard: “You mean you got a (fill in name of game animal) and you didn’t phone me right away?” I could hear the disappointment in her voice. It’s not that she cared a bit about the hunt itself. She was disappointed that she had missed those additional days of sharing my joy. Mom was a good listener, and if she didn’t understand all the details of the hunts I recounted for her, that didn’t show in her attentiveness. Mom had a way of interjecting, “Really?” “Oh my, hon!” “And then what happened?” as if she were following all I said and actually wanted to hear it. I know what she loved was the delight the retelling brought to my voice, and I’m grateful she tolerated the tales. I wasn’t the only hunter in our family, and not the only one whose outdoor adventures became part of the knit of my mother’s life. There was her son, her husband and her grandkids, as well. The truest test of Mom’s devotion to her family was when her grandson explained in minute and graphic detail, “how you gut a deer,” a new and evidently exciting skill for him. She told me later, “He went on and on about how you had to have the knife sharp and you had to cut into the skin MARCH 2010 Bob Steiner BACK IN THE EARLY 1980s, Mom gave camping a try, just for me. One evening a skunk visited the camp, and she was watchful that it might still be lurking close by . . . perhaps in that pile of firewood. just so and not break open the belly, but if you did you had to wipe it all out. Ugh!” She’d made a face, but she never asked him to stop the story. “My afternoon program was on,” she said, “and I was watching that and trying to keep an ear on what he was saying.” She paused. “It was so important to him.” The many family photos posted with magnets on Mom’s refrigerator door and tucked into the edge of the china cabinet glass included graduation and wedding pictures, vacation shots and Christmas postcards. As prominently displayed for her visiting New York City suburbs neighbors to see were photos of her daughter and son and grandchildren posing in blaze orange hats and vests at the end of their hunts. In the pictures we were smiling and that made the photo one she had to keep, even if it did have a dead animal in it. Mom was the kind of person who dressed up to go to the store for bread and milk, with lipstick and hair just so. She wasn’t the “roughing it” type, but she gave camping a try or two, just for me. If there was anything about camping she found pleasurable for herself, it was sitting on the

Pennsylvania Game News - March 2010

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