In 2014, I quit my longtime Virginia newspaper job to write books about the plight of the rural South-about the legacy of Jim Crow, the aftermath of jobs lost to globalization, and the consequences of a grand pharmaceutical swindling that kick-started an overdose crisis and wound up killing more than a million Americans. The next year I nailed the long-coveted fellowship, a stepping-stone to a new career in which I came to work for the toughest boss of all (gulp): myself. Soon after the fall, I gave up mountain biking for smoother, safer greenway riding, entering the long and awkward transition between spring chicken and geriatric fowl.
Okay, so it turns out that Mom was right about my cycling prowess. Mom’s hydrangea became the centerpiece of my front yard, and in time, it would mean so much more. When it more than quadrupled in size, I painted the metal glider nearby the same shade of blue. She stayed a week and returned home without conflict or drama-a first.Īfter she left, I planted the hydrangea next to my front-porch steps, where its Frida Kahlo–blue blossoms still elicit compliments from passersby. It had been decades since I’d felt so tenderly mothered. To keep my cast dry, Mom washed my hair in the laundry room sink. She cleaned the house and did the laundry, carefully folding our underwear into tiny little squares that looked like presents-she was a Midwestern Marie Kondo before Kondo was even a thing. She fried her signature chicken, their favorite. The next day, she drove from Ohio to my home in Roanoke, Virginia, to take care of me and help with the kids. The day of my hand surgery, I returned home to find a vibrant blue potted hydrangea Mom had had delivered to our front porch. When I was growing up, my favorite day was May 30, not because it was my birthday but because it usually coincided with the holiday that my family called Decoration Day, a precursor to Memorial Day, when every female Macy within a day’s drive was expected to come plant flowers and spruce up the urns at our ancestors’ graves. Other than beer and chocolate, the only thing we agreed on consistently was flowers. She hated my fashion sense-she considered it more hobo than boho. Mom had never seen the point of riding bikes when you had a perfectly serviceable car sitting in the driveway. While we loved each other deeply, my mom and I had an unspoken agreement to heed Ben Franklin’s adage for visitors: “Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” After seventy-two hours, we got on each other’s nerves about most things.Įxercise, for example. I was so different from the rest of my family, my mother told me once, half joking, that I might have arrived from a distant planet. I was my parents’ midlife “accident,” the youngest by far of their four kids. So my mother’s comment raised my hackles, as only a mother’s scolding can. I was forty-four then, and despite all the setbacks, I mostly still felt like a spring chicken. In between, summer pneumonia sent me to bed for a week with a fever so high I passed out.
I’d recently been wait-listed for a journalism opportunity I’d long coveted, the Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, followed by another rejection for a tenure-track teach ing job. It was July of 2008, one of the crappiest years on record, and not just for the stock market. Those bones turned out to be critical tools in the act of typing, which is how I earn my living as a writer. I had just soared over the handle-bars of my mountain bike, landing so hard in the dirt that I pulverized several bones in my left hand. Eighty-one at the time, she was one to talk. “Remember, you’re no spring chicken,” she said.
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