For Meredith

Meredith spent her childhood in a house that was always full of family. She never could find a place to herself, not in that house full of her grandmother and her mother and her red-headed sister. Her aunts lived in a row down Divine Street, and they and their husbands and her cousins were always around, smoking and making pots of roux and playing cards and laughing up a good thunderstorm, which was always welcome in that house where there was no air conditioning.

Meredith attended Catholic school there in New Orleans, and folded her hands every Sunday at mass (and ate a few powdered sugared beignets at Cafe du Monde). Her father died of a heart attack when she was still young. There are other deeply painful experiences in her life that she has told me about, and I have sat transfixed and watched her, this lovely woman who has lived through so much. And then she grew into a beauty with luminescent eyes and long waving brown hair, and finally Meredith left New Orleans, and that set her apart from the rest of her family, who surely wondered why she wanted to pack up and head to Houston. But she loved Houston, and she loved this man named Ken who looked like John Denver and wielded a mean camera out of helicopters.

She gave her two children what she had always wanted when she was a child: rooms of their own. I like to think of her decorating that first house, a space that belonged to her finally. But she never stopped sharing her space. She transformed their dining room into a bedroom and then, for all of her children's childhood, she cared for her own bed-ridden mother. I like to watch her talk about her mother. She is honest and frank about her own shortcomings, but I know how her long care for her ill mother gentled her children and made them wise. Her children learned compassion and tenderness from watching their mother care for their grandmother. For two years she cared for her father-in-law as well. The stories of those times are full of humor, and in good southern fashion she peppers the tales with knee-slapping guffaws. She still laughs this way at Ken's jokes, and I see by watching them how good love can last through many years. In this way she brought up my husband Martin, and in this way she cares for us now, for the folks at her church and for her four grandchildren.

I always gain weight at my mother-in-law's house. She is generous with her kitchen (only forbidding me once in a blue moon: "I mean it, now; I'm going to clean this up by myself") but nobody cooks up a pot of Louisiana beans and rice like she does. I can never hope to brown roux as perfectly and all I want for Christmas any year is a big helping of her unbelievable gumbo, chock-full of shrimp she deveins by hand for hours and crab meat and okra.

I know a few quirky things about my mother-in-law. (What daughter-in-law doesn't?) I know she closes down a restaurant because she eats much more slowly than she talks. I know well that she has watched every episode ever made of "Murder She Wrote." I well know her sayings: "Here's the deal. . ." and "Advice is free" and I have experienced her skilled hand and the way she teases when she plays cards.

I also know a few things about Meredith's dreams. I hope to see her tooling up the East Coast some day, her face alight in the blaze of fall. I don't know about filling that bunkhouse full of grandchildren, but I know four girls running around her house is pretty good for now.

And today, on her birthday, I would like to thank my mother-in-law for the way she has lived her life, and for the way she shares her stories with me as though I were her own flesh and blood. I'd like to congratulate her for her vigorous laughter and I bend my knee to her for bringing up such a good, rare man as her son. I want to thank her for her love for my children and the tenderness and affection she shows to her husband. For her hands that gentle at the sight of an elderly person, for her eyes that steel with love and courage at the mention of God, for her kisses and hugs and late night card games, for the way she has weathered each year, bad or good, with grace--thank you.