From the cabin

On mother’s day

A parking lot.

A truck with a trailer.

Next

To this? A line up, and a sign:

Lobster $16 a pound.

In my childhood, Mother’s Day was traditionally a big lobster feed.

Sure, we’d have steamed clams and when the muscle ranch went in, we have muscles. They would be potato salad, coleslaw and dinner rolls. Lobster was always the centrepiece.

And despite the fact that this was Mother’s, Day dedicated to mothers my grandfather was always in the middle of everything. But the lobster that my grandfather got never came from the back of a truck in the parking lot. Usually he bought it from one of the fisherman who kept his trailer in my grandfathers campground.

Plastic table covers.

Music.

Laughter.

Mother’s Day was the one day a year that my grandfather pretended to cook. He didn’t barbeque and he certainly didn’t boil potatoes. Nor did he make the potato salad or the coleslaw or the dinner rolls for the Mother’s Day celebration.

He did however boil the lobsters and clams. My grandmother just seem t…