A Practical Mom

can go to Bible study every Sunday and swear she’s still not convinced, but she likes to be around people who are. We have the same conversation every few years—I’ll ask her if she stops to admire the perfect leaves of the Japanese maple she waters in her backyard, or tell her how I can gaze for hours at a desert sky and know this as divine. Nature, she says, doesn’t hold her interest. Not nearly as much as the greens, pinks, and grays of a Diebenkorn abstract, or the antique Tiffany lamp she finds in San Francisco. She spends hours with her vegetables, tasting the tomatoes she’s picked that morning or checking to see which radishes are big enough to pull. Lately everything she touches bears fruit, from new-green string beans to winning golf strokes, glamorous hats she designs and sews, soaring stocks with their multiplying shares. These are the things she can count in her hands, the tangibles to feed and pass on to daughters and grandchildren who can’t keep up with all the risky numbers she depends on, the blood-sugar counts and daily insulin injections, the monthly tests of precancerous cells in her liver and lungs. She’s a mathematical wonder with so many calculations kept alive in her head, adding and subtracting when everyone else is asleep.