Finding my mother in paper and ink

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/03/2025 (386 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I’ve been hearing from my mother quite often lately.

Not in person, unfortunately.

She no longer has a lot to say when I visit her at the retirement home, beyond “What did you say your name was?” and “It looks cold out there today.”

She hates being cold.

On one recent visit, she woke from her doze on the couch in the lobby to ask where we were going.

I suggested a game of Scrabble in the library, but once we got there she decided she didn’t want to play but preferred to go to her room for a nap.

I sat with her until she fell asleep and then walked home, feeling bereft.

Some visits are like that; some are more social. It depends on the day and her mood.

Missing her, I recently decided to start reading the journals she kept over decades. It doesn’t feel like an invasion of privacy for several reasons.

First, my mother said I could have them one day, and this day seems as right as any other.

Second, she enjoyed writing and liked her work to be read.

Third, despite being a world-class worrier, she kept her innermost feelings off the page. So, if what I’m looking for is insights into interpersonal relationships, I know I’m unlikely to find them between the pages of these notebooks that she wrote in so faithfully.

About the notebooks: I love the sheer variety of them — multicoloured, hardcover, softcover, lined and unlined, spiral bound and not. Some have flowers on the cover and feature quotes from famous women. Others are nondescript, the word “Journal” emblazoned on the front.

I have barely scratched the surface of them yet, but what a treasure trove.

And through her words, her flowing blue-ink script, she is coming back to me.

Reading her entries from 1990, I realize my mother was the very age that I am now: 59. I try to remember how she was then, when she came to visit me when I was living and working in Ottawa at The Hill Times.

June 1990: “I took pictures. Saw (CBC’s) Don Newman and took his picture. We bought some poutine and pink lemonade.”

My mother records that she made that trip bearing fresh fish and caribou, which she cooked during her stay. Indeed, much of her writing is consumed with the daily giving, receiving, preparing and sharing of food.

She may have ended up living in St. John’s, but she kept her rural heart.

Out around the bay in Newfoundland, food was often currency. A gift of fresh herring might be rewarded with a gallon of damsons. A brace of rabbits might lead to an invitation to lunch, with a butter tub of seafood chowder to take home. My father was not a hunter, but thanks to friendships made in the community, we lived largely on seasonal food and game — berries, homegrown vegetables, bottled mussels, moose roasts, fried mackerel, bakeapple jam.

Helping neighbours, visiting the lonely and the sick, feeding friends and family, these things were paramount in my mother’s life.

Her diaries are devoted to the rituals of domesticity: cleaning, cooking and baking, volunteering, serving the church, socializing. They detail a constant churn of visitors — some popping by for a cup of tea, others in town for medical appointments and needing a bed for the night.

I can hear her so clearly through her words:

April 2010: “Not a bad day. The temperatures are slowly climbing. I did laundry and the usual chores. (So-and-so) came by this afternoon, after his treatment, and we had tea and cinnamon buns.”

My parents were both lovers of nature and were happiest in the years spent at their cabin in Gin Cove, which was directly across the water from Random Island, the second largest island off Newfoundland.

October 1999: “The island is especially beautiful now with the trees all decked out in their golds, reds and oranges. … I’d like to remember them that way until we come back in the spring, when they turn green again. Then we’ll sit on the deck with our cups of tea and know this is as good as it gets.”

I like to remember my mother this way: busy, happy and content. The woman she is in these pages, so vital and giving and engaged with the world around her, is the essence of who she was — and perhaps still is on some level, though she is no longer able to express herself in the same way.

She may not be able to cook for us now, but her writing is like comfort food; a gift given with love.

Instead of plums, it is memories she has preserved for us, ones that Alzheimer’s can never erase; her journals a safe place where I can always go to find her.

Pam Frampton is a freelance writer and editor who lives in St. John’s. pamelajframpton@gmail.com X: pam_frampton | Bluesky: @pamframpton.bsky.social