Mom Said This Day Would Come

Somewhere in eternity, my mom is laughing every time I see this box (or the many like it at various stores across town).

 

Mom died on New Year’s Day in 2013, twelve years ago yesterday, and I’m often reminded of her in small ways from time to time.

Besides, the obvious dates of significance like her birthday and anniversary, when scrolling through pictures on my phone or catching a glimpse of a picture on the walls of our home. When we make her homemade tapioca pudding (or any time we pull her cookbook down to find a recipe). Every spring, when the magnolia tree we planted in her memory blooms.

Sometimes, even random people I run across in public that have similar physical characteristics (I damn near fell out a couple years ago when I bumped into her doppelgänger…lady coulda been her twin sister!)

And nowadays, anytime I walk into our local grocery store during the fall.

In early summer of 2001, Mom and Dad moved from their home in southwest Missouri to Newton, KS. My daughter was about 18 months old at the time, was crying and wouldn’t fall asleep. So I bundled her into her car seat and drove until she stopped screaming…to Wichita. Thirty minutes away. As she finally drifted off to sleep in the late-night hours, and I fought to stay awake, I turned around and made the return 30-minute drive back. Carrying her pumpkin seat into the bedroom and setting it down ever-so-gently, she did what babies often do…woke right the hell up and started screaming again.

“Your turn,” as I looked at my wife and passed out from exhaustion.

Why anyone would move to Kansas is still a mystery to me, but here we were…packing up my childhood home of ~15 years to move my parents to the flattest place on Earth…Newton, Kansas. In her basement, my mom had – not one, but TWO 55-gallon barrels packed with pine cones. Before moving to Missouri in ~1986, we did about a 2-year stint in central Texas…a small town in the middle of nowhere about the size of my left butt cheek – and as memorable for me as the crack a quarter inch to the right of that cheek. Those two 55-gallon drums of pine cones made the trip from Texas to Missouri.

Pine trees in central Texas. Not something you’d expect to see. While pine trees can be found in eastern Texas, they’re not really native to the rest of Texas. Certainly not in central Texas. Which means these two 55-gallon drums of pine cones were brought here.

In this case, they were moved here from southern California, my childhood home prior to Texas. Yes, my mom picked the pine cones out of our suburban California yard (which is to say she most likely had my three brothers and me gather them, I just can’t remember that far back nowadays), packed them into two 55-gallon barrels and then drove for two days across four states to Texas. Where they sat in her basement for three years.

Then she loaded them into a U-Haul truck (or more likely had someone do it for her) and hauled them for another ten hours, across three states, to Missouri. Where they sat in her basement for fifteen years.

While helping to pack her home, I stood staring at these pine cones in her basement in the summer of 2001. On the precipice of moving her to another state, this is how that conversation unfolded:

Me: “We’re not loading these pine cones.”

Mom: “Yes, son. We are.”

Me: “Nope! Not gonna do it.”

Mom: “You can do it, or I will, but they’re coming.”

Me: “You’ve had these pine cones for nearly 20 years and haven’t used them. What’s the point?”

Mom: “People pay good money for pine cones.”

Me: “In what world?”

Mom: (shoots me ‘the look’)

Me: “Really?!”

Mom: “The perfect pine cone is hard to find, and I’m telling you, people will pay top dollar for the perfect one.”

Me: “You haven’t sold them in nearly two decades. What makes you think that’s going to change in the next two years?”

Mom: “I’ll have more time to do crafting and sell them while we’re there.”

Me: (shoots her ‘the look’ right back)

Mom: “Jason Edward!!!”

Me: “Mom, you’re keeping this house as a rental and planning to move back here in two years. They can stay here, and if you want them before you move back, I’ll bring them to you.”

Mom: “I can’t trust that the people renting the house while we’re gone won’t steal them.”

Me: “Aren’t you friends with them?”

Mom: “The pine cones are coming!”

Me: “Fine! I’ll load them and move them to Kansas, but this is the last time, Mom! I am NOT moving them back into this house in two years when you move back!”

Mom: (grinning as if she had always known I was powerless to resist)

Mom’s been gone for twelve years today (as I write this), and I can’t walk into a grocery store within 10 miles of me and NOT find a box of scented pine cones for sale as I walk through the door. For damn good money too (well, for a freakin’ pine cone anyway)! As high as $3 per pine cone! (shakes his head in disbelief).

Adjusted for inflation, they would have sold in 2001 for the whole whopping “top dollar” price of $1.66/each. ChatGPT tells me each 55-gallon barrel would have held approximately 195 pine cones…390 total between the two barrels. That comes out to just under $650 (in 2001 dollars that is.)

Yeah…she’s up there in eternity smiling and saying, “I told you!”

Yeah, you did mom. You did. Back then, $650 would’ve put two weeks’ worth of groceries in our house of four boys, so maybe not quite retirement nest egg worthy, but quite the haul.

And yes…two years after moving those two barrels of pine cones from Missouri to Kansas, I did what any loving son would do for his mom…moved them right back into her basement in Missouri.

I’m pretty sure they’re still there today.

Who’s up for a road trip? With inflation, we could probably make $1,000 (minus the gas money to get there and back, we could cash in on that $650…and put three days’ worth of groceries in the pantry. 😉🙄

Love, Dad