Love, Your Only Mother
Love, Your Only Mother
David Michael Kaplan Another postcard from you today, Mother, and I see by the blurred postmark that you're in Manning, North Dakota now and that you've dated the card 1961. In your last card you were in Nebraska, and it was 1962; you've lost some time, I see. I was a little girl, nine years old, in 1961. You'd left my father and me only two years before. Four months after leaving, you sent me—always me, never him—your first postcard, of a turnpike in the Midwest, postmarked Enid, Oklahoma. You called me "My little angel" and said that the sunflowers by the side of the road were tall and very pretty. You signed it, as you always have, "Your only mother." My father thought, of course, that you were in Enid, and he called the police there. But we quickly learned that postmarks meant nothing: you were never where you had been, had already passed through. in the wanderings only you understand. A postcard from my mother, I tell my husband, and he grunts. Well, at least you know she's still alive, he says. Yes. This postcard shows a wheat field bending in the wind. The colors are badly printed: the wheat's too red, the sky too blue—except for where it touches the wheat, there becoming aquamarine, as if sky and field could somehow combine to form water. There's a farmhouse in the distance. People must live there, and for a moment I imagine you do, and I could walk through the red wheat field, knock on the door, and find you. It's a game I've always played, imagining you were hiding somewhere in the postcards you've sent. Your scrawled message, as always, is brief: "The beetles are so much larger this year. I know you must be enjoying them. Love, your only mother." What craziness is it this time? my husband asks. I don't reply. Instead, I think about your message, measure it against others. In the last postcard seven months ago, you said you'd left something for me in a safety deposit box in Ferndale. The postmark was Nebraska, and there's no
David Michael Kaplan Another postcard from you today, Mother, and I see by the blurred postmark that you're in Manning, North Dakota now and that you've dated the card 1961. In your last card you were in Nebraska, and it was 1962; you've lost some time, I see. I was a little girl, nine years old, in 1961. You'd left my father and me only two years before. Four months after leaving, you sent me—always me, never him—your first postcard, of a turnpike in the Midwest, postmarked Enid, Oklahoma. You called me "My little angel" and said that the sunflowers by the side of the road were tall and very pretty. You signed it, as you always have, "Your only mother." My father thought, of course, that you were in Enid, and he called the police there. But we quickly learned that postmarks meant nothing: you were never where you had been, had already passed through. in the wanderings only you understand. A postcard from my mother, I tell my husband, and he grunts. Well, at least you know she's still alive, he says. Yes. This postcard shows a wheat field bending in the wind. The colors are badly printed: the wheat's too red, the sky too blue—except for where it touches the wheat, there becoming aquamarine, as if sky and field could somehow combine to form water. There's a farmhouse in the distance. People must live there, and for a moment I imagine you do, and I could walk through the red wheat field, knock on the door, and find you. It's a game I've always played, imagining you were hiding somewhere in the postcards you've sent. Your scrawled message, as always, is brief: "The beetles are so much larger this year. I know you must be enjoying them. Love, your only mother." What craziness is it this time? my husband asks. I don't reply. Instead, I think about your message, measure it against others. In the last postcard seven months ago, you said you'd left something for me in a safety deposit box in Ferndale. The postmark was Nebraska, and there's no
Cited: at the end of your essay: Kaplan, David Michael. "Love, Your Only Mother." Sudden Fiction International. Eds. Robert Shapard and James Thomas. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989. 85-88. Print. Note that Modern Language Association (MLA format (used in the Humanities) is different from the American Psychological Association (APA) format used in the Social Sciences. For details of the MLA format and style, see Purdue OWL, "MLA Formatting and Style Guide." 2 MLA citation from printed sources uses page numbers to identify where quotations or content summarized or paraphrased came from. For your interpretive essay, use the page numbers from this handout (rather than the page numbers of the original source). 3