Bark Versus Bite

 It's a wonder that she lasted as long as she did. 

Not because of the laundry list of maladies with which she was afflicted. 

Not because her husband left her in the moment that should have been their collective victory lap.

Not because she lived a peculiarly unhealthy lifestyle. 

It's a wonder that my mother lived so very long with the heaps of abuse that my brothers and I piled on her over the course of decades. To be clear, when I say "my brothers and I," I know that I am really just trying to be viewed as part of a gang, a ruthless troupe of pranksters who looked for opportunities to keep my mother's blood pressure high. 

But I am really just talking about me. 

Ours was a noisy household. My mother reveled in those quiet moments she could get when her husband, sons and dog were elsewhere and she could enjoy sitting back and listening to a little classical music or playing the piano before the herd returned to whoop it up. It was the tiniest measure of understanding which brought my father to make the only rule I can remember having in that house: Don't bark at your mother. Which only meant that we looked for those moments when we could sneak up behind her while she was at the kitchen sink, and bark. Seeing her jump out of her skin was a prime joy and I confess that it was one that I mined, knowing that I would get a bemused reminder from my dad about the one rule we had in the house. 

It wasn't until later that I learned that there was even more fun to be had with the long con. April Fool's Day was an annual event for my mother and I. My older brother whose job it became in the autumn years of my mother's life to keep her alive would see the calendar page turn and remind her not to believe anything that I told her. 

Like the time I called her up to let her know that her youngest son had decided to join a Buddhist monastery. Ever the patient good sport, she took the news as well as anyone might, but wondered how this had happened, and probably assumed that it was due to some deficit in her parenting. 

It wasn't. My younger brother wasn't even in on the gag. I was using the mild potential that it was something surprising that could worry my mother to bark at her. Long distance. 

Over the years there were plenty of permutations of this exchange, all engineered to get my mother's blood pressure to jump. Changing her Netflix queue was a good one. For a few weeks all she was getting were movies in Russian. And every so often, when I made a visit back to the homestead, and she was standing at the kitchen sink, I could not suppress the urge. 

A year ago, my mother went to her final reward: peace and quiet. She left with the knowledge that she had bested me by going on her own terms, not collapsing in a heap because of one of my clever hijinks. 

But now I find myself from time to time, standing at the kitchen sink. Waiting for the sound.