Mom
She was beautiful. Everyone loved her. She was the center of my universe, and she built the world I grew up in — or rather she cleared the ground and handed me the tools and let me build my own, which is harder and rarer than building it for someone.
She called me Donny. She called me her beeler — a local word for a wild little boy — or her goober, her goober pea. I pretended to take offense every time, and every time she knew I didn’t mean it, and every time the pretending was part of the game, the small ritual of a mother and a son who understood each other’s rhythms the way musicians in the same band stop counting beats.
She had a song she would sing to me as a toddler. A simple melody I think she made up, or maybe her mother sang it to her — I’ll never know which, because the person who could have told me is gone. The lyrics were just: That’s mama’s little boy, that’s mama’s little boy, that’s mama’s little boy, and I love him so very much. That was the whole song. I sang it to each of my kids. I didn’t decide to. It just came out, the way a song will, when you’re holding something small and the room is quiet and your mouth remembers what your mother taught it before your mind was keeping records.
She told me that when I was a baby, I would wake up in the crib, grab the side rails with both hands, bounce on the mattress, and say Mama, it’s time to get up! I had blonde hair like hers — or at least like hers had been as a child. I would find out years later that she dyed it as an adult, which briefly rearranged something in my understanding of her, the way any small revelation about a parent does. People tell me I look like her. I take that as the highest compliment anyone has ever given me, and I don’t say that lightly, and I don’t say it for effect.
Betty was born June 28, 1947. I have her baby book. I have her birth certificate. My grandma kept a lock of her hair pressed between the pages — a small curl, golden, impossibly fine, the kind of thing that seems sentimental to the point of strange until you lose someone, and then it becomes the most rational act of preservation you can imagine. I found it strange once. I don’t anymore.
She grew up in Preble, on the northeast side of Green Bay. I like to say Preble because the name has since been swallowed by the city — annexed, rezoned, incorporated into a municipality that doesn’t remember the smaller place it consumed. The remnants of the name survive only in the high school. Her father, my grandpa, built their house while the family lived in a small pill-shaped trailer on the same lot. The house was tiny, the size of a two-stall garage, but the foundation was exceptional — laid stone by stone by a man who was a master stonemason and who understood that what holds a thing up matters more than what sits on top of it. He also built a grotto beside the house, cement stairs and gardens cascading down the slope, as large as the house itself, a shrine for my grandma with the Blessed Virgin standing watch over the yard. The stonemason building devotional architecture for the women he loved. That impulse ran in the family. It still does.
My grandma Helen — Mom’s mother, the woman my sister is named for — died of a heart attack on June 7, 1974. Three months before I was born. I never met her. Mom told me many times over the years that her mother had been so excited to become a grandma, that she would have spoiled me with love, that she was counting the days. Mom repeated this story at holidays, on drives, during quiet moments when something reminded her of the woman who wasn’t there. It didn’t affect me much as a kid — how do you grieve someone you never knew? But now I understand. She wasn’t telling me for my sake. She was telling me for hers. Saying it out loud kept her mother in the room. The repetition was the ritual, and the ritual was the remembering, and the remembering was all she had left.
I think her mother’s death lived underneath everything else. Mom was fun. She was jovial and warm and magnetic and loud with laughter. But there was a sadness beneath the warmth, a current running under the surface that you could feel if you were paying attention, and I was always paying attention even when I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. She lost her mother and then spent the rest of her life mothering everyone she met — every friend, every stray animal, every stranger who knocked on the door, every shut-in who needed a meal. The math isn’t complicated. The hole was mother-shaped, and she spent her years trying to fill it from the other side.
She went to Danz Elementary School, which is still standing, still in the same place. I drive by it sometimes and think about a girl with blonde hair walking through those doors fifty years before me. I have her school pictures. She was a cute little girl — shy smile, hopeful eyes, the kind of face that has already learned to brace for something.
She told me stories of being near the bottom of the social ladder, made fun of often, the poor kid in a classroom full of kids who could smell poverty the way dogs smell fear. I remember thinking, even as a child myself, that this might be the reason she became who she was — the kindest person in any room, the one who made sure nobody felt left out, the one who pulled up a chair for the stranger. She knew what it felt like to be the one who didn’t belong. She spent her whole life making sure nobody around her felt that way again.
One anecdote she told me many times, and it broke my heart every time. She wanted saddle shoes. The black-and-white ones all the other girls wore, the ones that said you were part of things, the ones that fit in. Her parents scraped together enough for off-brand look-alikes. She was happy. She was proud. She went to school feeling, for once, like she belonged. The kids knew immediately. They were fakes. The kids made fun of her worse than before — not for being poor, which they already knew, but for trying not to be. That is a particular cruelty: the punishment not for your condition but for your hope. Children can spot a counterfeit shoe at ten paces and a family’s desperation in the same glance. She carried that story her whole life, and I think she carried the shoes too, somewhere inside her, the ghost of wanting something so badly and having the wanting turned into a weapon against you.
She told stories of playing around what was then rural northeast Green Bay — running through the fields with her older brother, playing baseball, fishing in the creeks. They lived near the mental asylum, and there were stories about patients who escaped the grounds. One showed up at the trailer with a knife in one hand and a dead rabbit in the other and stood in the doorway. Mom’s mother talked him down. Calm and steady, her voice low and even, guiding him back the way you’d guide a frightened animal — no sudden movements, no raised voice, just the quiet authority of a woman who understood that fear makes people dangerous and gentleness is the only antidote. Many of Mom’s childhood stories had this quality — they sounded like Depression-era stories even though it was the 1950s. Times were hard. Her father worked hard. But hard work and hard times can coexist without contradiction, and in that family, they always did.
Animals were the constant in my mother’s life, the thread that ran through every era, every address, every chapter. She could speak their language. Not metaphorically — she had a way with creatures that went beyond training or knowledge into something closer to kinship, as if she and the animals had made an agreement the rest of us weren’t party to.
As a kid she had a pet raccoon named Bandit. I have the photo of the two of them on my fridge — a girl and a raccoon, both looking at the camera with the same expression of alert mischief. She kept rabbits, ferrets, birds. But the love of her life, before Dad, before us, was Troy — a black Morgan quarter horse she bought when she was sixteen with money she’d earned herself. She also had a ‘57 Chevy around the same time. It was in rough shape, rusted and temperamental, but she was proud of it. Sixteen years old with a black horse and a Chevy and the whole northeast side of Green Bay to ride through. She smoked, too. She and her friend Sheila and the rest of them would cross the street from Preble High to Smokers Hill, the patch of ground where it was tolerated, and light up between classes. It seemed like everyone smoked back then — it was just what you did, part of the texture of being young in the sixties, as unremarkable as the Chevy or the saddle shoes. Not Dad, though. Dad was always squeaky clean. Deena kept the habit for decades. Mom quit, and she said it was God who helped her do it, which was how she explained every hard thing she’d ever accomplished — not willpower, not discipline, but grace. When she decided something, it was decided, and she always gave the credit to someone else. The dog she had then was Nia — a large portrait of the two of them hung on the wall of my grandpa’s house for as long as I can remember, young woman and hunting dog side by side, both looking at the camera like they owned the world and the world had quietly agreed.
She joined the American Kennel Club and bred and trained dogs from then on. She kenneled wealthier people’s dogs as a young woman before she met Dad — the working-class kid caring for the rich people’s animals, doing it better than they could, knowing things about their dogs that they would never learn because they didn’t spend enough time on the ground. There was Nia, then Duke, then Rusty, all hunting dogs from that period, all of whom would partially make their way into my earliest memories. I don’t remember much about them. But they have gravestones in the farmstead yard — small markers in the grass that I mowed around as a teenager without thinking much about what they meant. The animals she loved outlived her memory of them only in stone and story.
She worked at Fort Howard, the big paper company in Green Bay. She said she made paper towel dispensers on the assembly line — the industrial kind, painted white steel housing, the brown folded tissue, you pull through the slot on the bottom. I have one of those exact models in my studio’s bathroom now. A lucky find that came with the building. I think about that sometimes — the strange circularity of it. My hands pull paper towels from a machine my mother’s hands helped assemble forty years ago. She is in the object. She is in the mechanism.
She moved to New Franken and lived in a trailer on Nicolet Drive, just down the street from Dad’s mother’s house — the proximity that would make everything else possible. She was the constable for New Franken, which she explained just meant catching strays and dealing with aggressive animals, a title that suited a woman who would spend her entire life collecting creatures nobody else wanted and calming the ones everyone else was afraid of. She was part of the New Franken Sportsman Club too, where she shot clay pigeons and trained her dogs. A young woman in rural Wisconsin with a badge and a shotgun and a way with animals. I don’t think she ever had trouble with the job.
Somehow she met Deena Nelson. Somehow is the wrong word — it was the geography of small-town proximity, the way lives overlap when the population is small enough that everyone is two handshakes from everyone else. Mom helped Deena’s daughters train their horses, and the horse work became a friendship, and the friendship became a lifelong bond. Deena introduced Mom to her other friend, a young man named Keith Krumpos — my Dad. Deena’s husband Floyd worked as a delivery driver at the lumber mill, and Mom lived right by the mill where Dad worked. The connections were already in place. The people just had to walk into them.
Dad bought her a soda at the fountain across the street from the house he grew up in — the place on Point Sable, the one that might have been called Schimmicks, the one that was already gone by my time. He was back from college and travels, looking for a career. Mom said he proposed six times over the next few months and she declined each time until the seventh. She probably knew from the first ask that it was meant to be. But she was being modest. Or testing his resolve. Or making him earn it. Or all three, because my mother could hold multiple intentions at once and make each one look like simple sweetness.
They were married at the little white historical Moravian church on the Grace Lutheran property — a postcard of a building, white clapboard, steeple, the kind of church that looks like it was designed to be photographed at weddings. It would later be relocated to Heritage Hill for the historical village, where it now hosts ceremonies for strangers who chose it from a brochure. I have photos of the wedding. Deena and Floyd stood up for them. The prints have that Kodak Instamatic look — the 126 cartridge format that every family owned in the seventies, the camera you loaded by dropping in a plastic film cartridge and advancing with a thumb wheel. The drugstore sent your photos back in a paper envelope a week later: one square print and one smaller portrait rectangle side by side, white-bordered, the colors already drifting toward orange because the cheap film stock couldn’t hold its dyes and the flash couldn’t hold its light. Some of the wedding shots are tilted at forty-five degrees, the photographer apparently holding the camera the way you’d hold a glass you were about to toast with. That format is gone now — the cartridges, the thumb wheel, the drugstore envelope, the week of waiting. A whole way of remembering, extinct. What survives is the record it left: orange, blurry, slightly crooked, the ceremony preserved in the technology a working-class family could afford, which is to say imperfectly, which is to say the only way that matters.
The farm was a blessing. Mom said that, and she meant it with the full weight of her faith behind it. The Speerschneiders hadn’t wanted to sell to my parents — and then, suddenly, they changed their minds. Mom said it was God. A door opened because she’d been praying at it, and whether you believe in that mechanism or not, the result was the same: she had land. A house. Buildings. A place to put a horse and a garden and a family and a life. She had come from a trailer and fake saddle shoes and a father’s stonework foundation, and now she had a century farm with a barn and outbuildings and trees that had been growing since before she was born.
She sold her horse trailer to afford the new sewage tank. She got pregnant with me shortly after. Her mother died. Then she quit Fort Howard — a good, high-paying job, the kind of reliable income that a family without money learns to hold onto — and took a waitressing position at the Royal Scot, a supper club and country club just a hayfield and a woods away from the farm. The flexibility was what a baby needed. Deena worked there and got her in. That’s where Mom met Debbie Schaut, who would become her best friend, and the Schauts would become our extended family, and the decision to trade a factory paycheck for tips and split shifts would ripple forward through decades of friendship and connection. The new job was meant to be, Mom would have said. Not because the universe conspired, but because she moved toward people with the gravitational pull of a woman who couldn’t help gathering others into her orbit. The world didn’t arrange itself around Betty Krumpos. Betty Krumpos arranged herself around the world, and then the world followed.
Dad became the chef at the Royal Scot. He told the story that he had no experience when they hired him, and the outgoing cook refused to help, guarding his recipes like state secrets. But one afternoon the cook left his recipe book open on the counter and stepped away, and Dad copied every recipe down in the time it took the man to use the bathroom. Chicken and ribs became his specialty. French onion soup. All the supper club standards — the food that Green Bay’s country club set expected on a white tablecloth on a Friday night. We liked to visit Dad at work because the owners, the Ver Baatens, would give us Mickey Mouse ice cream bars, the kind where the ears always broke off first.
Times were tight with the chef job as our main income. We didn’t know it. To me and Helen, it was just how things were. The economics of childhood are invisible when the love is loud enough.
She kept an old black-and-white photograph of the farm, Victorian-era, taken sometime near when the place was built. The original Speerschneider family standing in front of the house with a white picket fence, the buildings behind them crisp and new, the trees no taller than a man. It was a beautiful property. Mom and Dad talked about putting the white picket fence back up someday because it was just so darling. They never did. The fence stayed in the photograph, a promise that lived in the talking about it rather than the doing of it. I liked studying that picture — seeing how the trees that were our entire world had once been saplings in someone else’s yard. The farm held time in layers, and Mom was the one who kept the oldest layer visible. She understood, maybe better than any of us, that a place is not just where you are but where everyone before you was, and that the two are the same ground.
Dad would never have been a farmer without her. It was her dream, and he loved her enough to become one. He adapted — learned the animals, learned the equipment, learned the rhythms of a life he hadn’t been raised for — because the woman he’d proposed to seven times wanted a farm, and giving her what she wanted was how he showed love. But she was the natural. She was the one who woke before the animals and fell asleep after them, the one who could tell from the sound of a goat’s bleating whether it was hungry or scared or just complaining. She was always in motion: gardening, tending, feeding, milking, mending, the homesteading tasks she didn’t perform out of obligation but out of love, the way some people garden because they must and not because they should. Troy finally had a place to run, and he ran it like he owned it. That horse was on top of Mom’s favorite list, and the feeling was mutual and exclusive. He would only listen to her. Helen and I would try to ride him sometimes, but Troy had a repertoire of refusals: scraping our legs against a fence post, veering toward the barn door at full speed so we’d either duck or get knocked off, turning back toward the stall the moment he decided the ride was over. We gave up. He was a sassy horse, and Mom liked them that way — enough sass to have a personality, enough sweetness to know when to stop. When she rode him, the sass vanished. He turned into a different animal, lit up, responsive, moving with her as if they were sharing the same nervous system. He would come for us if we had an apple in our hand, but if our hands were empty, he would only come for Mom. She had a trick where she would roll him over onto his back, sit on his belly, and hold his front legs — a trust exercise that only works when the horse trusts the person completely and the person trusts the horse right back. She had a lot of little tricks like that, but that one was the best, the most improbable, the one that made visitors stare.
When we were younger, we would go to her horse shows. Helen and I called it rodeo, but there were no bulls or clowns — it was more about technical showmanship. She did barrel racing, weaving Troy around the barrels at speed, the two of them banking through the turns as a single body. She had a lasso she would use to catch a barrel from the saddle, leaning out at angles that looked impossible from the stands. We would sit with Deena and watch and not really understand the rules or the scoring, but it didn’t matter. Mom looked elegant on that horse. She looked like the person she was most fully — not a waitress, not a farm wife, not a church volunteer, but a woman who could talk to animals and make a thousand-pound creature do what she asked through nothing but trust and timing.
The arena I remember was right off Highway 57 on Church Road, next to the cemetery. It’s gone now — torn down, the land absorbed into something else, no marker, no sign that it was ever there. I think of it every time I drive past. All the things that happened in that space — the competitions, the Saturday crowds, the horses and the dust and the applause — buried in the soil with no one to remember. Except me, or Helen, or whatever other kid once sat in those stands and watched an adult they loved compete. Until we’re all gone too, and then even the remembering is finished.
She told us she had raced sulkies when she was younger — the two-wheeled carts pulled by a trotting horse, the driver sitting low and leaning back, the whole contraption moving at a speed that seems reckless for something with no brakes and no seatbelt. We still had the sulky cart behind the machine shed, and we would give each other rides with a kid playing horse in the harness, sprinting down the yard pulling the cart behind us. We imagined Mom racing for real but couldn’t fully picture it until she showed us a sulky race in a movie. It was bizarre to us — and still kind of cool. We had the buckboard too, a wooden wagon we loved riding with Troy or one of the other horses pulling it. It was often parked in the back of the garage, broken, missing a pinion, waiting for a repair that never came. Dad had a to-do list a mile long, and fixing the buckboard sat somewhere near the bottom, well below patching the fence where the latest horse escape had happened and a hundred other things that kept a century farm from falling apart. The equipment accumulated around the property like props from a western that hadn’t wrapped yet — the sulky, the buckboard, the tack hanging in the barn — evidence of the life Mom had built and the life she was still building.
She liked to give kids horse rides when friends came over. All my friends would get a chance. She would hold the reins and guide the horse, walking alongside, patient and steady, letting the child on top believe they were doing the steering. She trained all her horses so you could mount from either side — a small detail that mattered, because it meant the horse was trained for everyone, not just for experienced riders. She rode Western style, to make it easy for everyone, though many of her horses were trained in both Western and English. Mom told us a few times — always with a faraway look, the kind of expression that lives halfway between a memory and a daydream — that before Dad, she had dated a horse breeder from Tennessee. He had money. A ranch with those wide-open pastures and the white fences running for miles, the kind you see in magazines about a life most people only drive past. She said if she’d stayed with him, we’d be living in Tennessee. Helen and I would scratch our heads at the philosophy of that — the idea that we could have been entirely different people in an entirely different place, that the life we knew was contingent on a choice she’d made before we existed. I also quietly hoped she hadn’t told Dad that story. It would have made him feel bad, and Dad already carried enough without knowing that the woman he’d proposed to seven times had once had an offer that came with white fences and acreage.
Helen was a classic horse girl of the eighties and would follow in Mom’s footsteps, but that belongs in the Helen chapter.
The dogs ran loose in the yard. She had cats — Smokey and Pongo were two I remember from that earliest era, farm cats with farm manners, appearing at the door for food and disappearing into the barn for everything else.
The garden was her masterpiece. She decided to make an enormous one — not a backyard patch but a production, the size of a football field. Dad brought out the tractor and plow and turned the earth, and I remember playing with my trucks in the fresh dirt along the edges while she worked the rows, the black soil warm from the sun and smelling like rain even when it hadn’t rained. She tended it every day. She kept notes. She read books about soil and seed and rotation. She was into organic gardening before anyone I knew used that phrase — composting the horse bedding, manure and all, spreading it across the rows, feeding the ground so the ground could feed us. She canned every fall, the kitchen filling with steam and the smell of hot vinegar and the particular dense sweetness of tomatoes being cooked down to their essence. She got Debbie Schaut into it too, convinced her to take a canning class at the UW Extension, and so we had fresh vegetables through the winter, jars lined up in the basement like a library of the summer organized by color.
Mom tried to make us eat healthy. But she was also a great baker, and these two impulses coexisted the way all contradictions coexist in a mother — simultaneously and without apology. Pies, brownies, and cookies were never scarce. During holidays she would have a batch of themed cookies waiting for us when we got home from school — the shapes and colors matching whatever the calendar demanded. The green shamrock ones were my favorite. She would try to make us eat boiled cabbage and corned beef on St. Patrick’s Day too, leaning into her Irish heritage even though it was probably only an eighth. The kitchen was the center. The center was hers.
No one who came to that kitchen ever went hungry. Friends and family would show up near dinnertime because she always had something on the stove, always had enough, always had room. The sound of tires on the gravel driveway was the announcement: someone was coming for dinner, or to help in the garden, or just to sit at the table and gab and play cards and drink coffee until the pot went cold and somebody made another one. She was inviting in the way gravity is inviting — not by effort but by nature, pulling people in because that’s what she was made to do. And she was funny. She told good stories. I got to hear them all, being the son who was always there, constantly lurking at the edges of the adult world, absorbing everything.
She made the holidays into productions. Egg dyeing for Easter, the kitchen counter covered in newspaper and cups of vinegar dye, the wax crayons for writing invisible messages that would appear when the egg came out of the color. Cranberry and popcorn stringing for Christmas, the needle pulling thread through kernels that crumbled if you pushed too hard, the cranberries staining your fingers red. She liked to make things with her hands and from scratch. It fit the life she’d built on the farm. I think people looked at us and thought we were Amish. We were far from it — but the wood-fired kitchen stove with an ice cream pail of lard on top for greasing the cast iron, the antique cabinets, the garden and the canning and the sewing and the mending — it did look like something from another century. Our favorite show was Little House on the Prairie, and it didn’t feel like fiction. It felt like a documentary about our own life, just with better lighting.
Mom sewed and crafted a lot of our things. Some of our clothes. She mended everything — a rip was not a reason to throw something away; it was a reason to sit down with a needle. I was embarrassed sometimes that we didn’t have the latest trends, that my clothes came from a sewing machine instead of a store. Looking back, none of that mattered. I admire her now for what I was embarrassed by then. She painted too — portraits of me and Helen, and folk-art designs on wooden objects Dad built for her: shelves, cutting boards, decorative pieces that accumulated on every surface of the house until the house itself became a gallery of her life, every wall and shelf holding something she’d made or mended or painted or decided to love enough to keep.
Cards were her social life. Skarney, Scrabble, whatever game was on the table that night. Mostly with Debbie Schaut, but anyone who sat down was dealt in. The kitchen table was always full. They drank Folgers coffee or Lipton tea. Nothing fancy. The ritual was the company, and the company was the point.
I would climb onto Mom’s lap and pretend to help her with her hand, studying the cards she held fanned out, suggesting plays I didn’t understand. But really I just wanted to be close. I’d lean back against her and listen to her voice through her neck — muffled, warm, vibrating through her chest while she talked and laughed and listened and talked some more. I could feel her heartbeat against my back. That is the most complete memory I have of my mother. Not a specific day. Not a specific event. The feeling of being held while she played cards and the kitchen filled with voices and the coffee went cold because nobody remembered to drink it and nobody cared.
In the early years she played guitar. She had a Gibson Hummingbird — a real instrument, warm-toned and resonant — and she’d sit in a circle in the living room with Uncle Ken and Bucky and sometimes Rick Schaut, all of them playing together, folk songs and country songs, the house filling with the sound of live music the way it fills a small house where nothing is soundproofed and everything is shared. I tried to play guitar. I tried the accordion. The brown jug and the washboard were all I could manage, but I sat in the circle and made noise alongside them, and those evenings — the music, the laughter, the adults treating it as play rather than performance — are some of the warmest hours I carry.
I don’t remember when or why she switched to the Omnichord. It came with her turn toward the more fundamentalist, and the shift from a Gibson Hummingbird to a plastic electronic chord machine felt like a loss I couldn’t articulate. She would lead Bible study groups at our house and play a few songs on it before they began — hymns rendered in synthetic tones, the instrument’s tiny speaker filling the room with a sound that was earnest and strange and nothing like the guitar. I thought it was a bizarre instrument then and I still do. Music was a big part of Mom’s life. She always had the Christian radio station on, WRVM or whatever it was, and she’d sing along while she cooked or cleaned or gardened, her voice carrying across the yard, unselfconscious and clear. I missed the guitar years. I missed the circle in the living room. I missed the sound of wood and strings instead of circuits and buttons. But the singing — the singing never changed.
I liked the Bible studies at our house, though. Not for the Bible. For the kids. All the parents brought their children, and while the adults studied Scripture in the living room, we played. Summer meant kick the can in the yard until it got too dark to see the can. Winter meant upstairs, where we invented an imaginary game called Haunted Hotel that I’ll write about in the Helen chapter. I would sometimes creep to the edge of the stairs and listen to Mom leading the study — her voice steady and certain, her faith expressed not as argument but as testimony, the way she talked about God the way she talked about the weather, as something real and present and not requiring proof. She had the struggle of the world on her heart. She would cry over the news, over someone’s illness, over the state of the culture. She thought the End Times were near. She wanted nothing more than for her children to be Saved — capital S, the permanent kind, the kind that meant we’d all be together on the other side of whatever was coming. That desire was the engine of her faith, and her faith was the engine of her life, and whether or not I share it now, I have never doubted that it was real.
Our house always had someone recovering in it. The spare bedroom functioned as a rotating ward, patients admitted on the strength of my mother’s conviction that you don’t send family to heal among strangers when you have a bed and a kitchen and two hands.
When her dad had a heart attack, he convalesced at our house. When Great-Grandma Marie needed hip surgery, that same room became hers. Mom would cook for them, sit with them, manage their medications, change their bandages if needed, do everything a nurse would do except get paid for it. She did it because it was right, and because she could, and because the Good Samaritan wasn’t a parable to her — it was a job description.
Then one day Henry knocked on the door.
Henry Servais. We didn’t know him. He was just an old man standing on the porch, asking if he could rent a room. He was eighty years old and couldn’t survive another winter alone in his Belgian farmhouse — the cold, the isolation, the failing body in an unforgiving house. Of course Mom said yes. She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t consult Dad. She just opened the door wider, the way she always opened the door wider, because the door was never really closed.
Henry became part of our family. He ate at our table. He sat in the living room. He became a second grandpa to me and Helen, though he was nothing like our real grandpas — he was stranger, funnier, more foreign, a piece of another century deposited in our kitchen. He was missing a thumb, and when we asked about it, he told us he’d lost it because he sucked it too much as a kid. He had thick glasses that magnified his eyes. A Belgian accent that turned every sentence into something you had to lean toward to understand. A hunchback. And a colostomy, which we learned about earlier than most children learn about such things, because when an eighty-year-old man lives in your house, his body becomes part of the household’s reality.
He was living history — eastern Brown County’s Belgian heritage made flesh, sitting at our table, eating my mother’s cooking, telling stories from a Wisconsin that predated electricity and indoor plumbing. He told us about the time his mother died in winter. They put her on the kitchen table because they couldn’t get out — the snow, the roads, the impossibility of moving a body when the world was frozen shut. She stayed on the table for weeks. He told this story the way very old people tell very hard stories — plainly, without drama, the facts delivered as facts, the horror long since absorbed into the ordinary texture of a life that contained more hardship than most of us will ever know.
Helen and I would act extra silly around him sometimes, performing for him, trying to get a rise out of his stoic Belgian face. He’d laugh or scold or both. It helped me start to understand that old people held entire lives inside them — that Henry had been young once, had run through the countryside on the road that still carries his family’s name, had fished and swum and gotten in trouble just like the rest of us. The old man at our table was also a boy in the Belgian farmlands, separated from us only by time.
He lived with us winters at first, then year-round as he got older. Mom would bring Henry and me fishing. She’d help him tend his garden — a marvel of makeshift engineering, fences cobbled from scrap wood, watering contraptions rigged from old hose and tin cans, the kind of ingenuity that comes from a lifetime of having nothing and making it work anyway. He had his own way of doing things, sometimes backward from the rest of us, but everything grew, which is the only metric that matters in a garden. Henry never married. Mom told us he kept his savings spread across five different banks, because that’s what his generation had learned from the Depression — never trust one institution with everything you have, because institutions fail, and when they fail they take it all. A bachelor farmer in rural Wisconsin with five bank accounts and a colostomy and a missing thumb and a dead mother on a kitchen table in his memory. Henry never married. That was a strange notion to us kids — all we knew were families, the paired-off adult world of mothers and fathers and kitchen tables set for four. A man who had lived his whole life alone in a farmhouse, who had no one to put on the kitchen table when he died, was outside our categories. We didn’t pity him. We just couldn’t quite picture it. When he finally had to go to a nursing home, it felt like losing a family member, because by then he was one.
His family would come and eat with us at the house. There were always enough chairs. There were always enough chairs at my mother’s table. If there weren’t, she’d find more. Me and Helen learned to share in moments like these — to make room, to set another place, to understand that the table expands to fit whoever shows up. That was Mom’s theology in miniature: there is always room for one more.
She collected every stray that found its way to the farm. Dogs, cats, horses, goats, chickens, people. The animals came and went and accumulated, and she loved each one with the particular devotion of a woman who saw herself in every creature that had been abandoned or overlooked or born too small to survive without help.
The special one was Ginger. My sister Helen prayed for a cat — actually prayed, on her knees — and then one day a Siamese appeared in the bushes at the front of the house. Not the angular, hairless kind. Fluffy and beautiful, with blue eyes and a disposition that suggested she’d chosen us rather than the other way around. Helen named her. I had Dori, my dog. Helen had Ginger. The division was fair and final.
Ginger mated with a Himalayan, and the kittens were beautiful — dark-furred, blue-eyed, the kind you could sell. We were supposed to sell them all through an arrangement with the father’s owner. But one of the black kittens fell from a high cabinet and landed wrong. His eye popped out. The vet removed it. A blessing in disguise, as most things were in that house, because the one-eyed cat couldn’t be sold — who would buy a damaged kitten? — so we got to keep him. We called him Captain Bly, but he was always just Cappy. He grew into an enormous, furry, one-eyed beast, the best cuddler in the house, purring like a diesel engine, bumping his head into your hand with the confidence of an animal who knew he was loved more for being broken. We joked he used up his nine lives fast. Ginger once dropped an entire litter down between the wall studs from the attic — we could hear them mewing inside the walls, tiny cries from inside the house’s skeleton. Cappy wandered into the cistern in the basement and Dad fished him out just in time, soaked and bewildered. Life on the farm was perilous for all species, indoors and out.
We always took the runt of the litter, because they were cheap or free. Our pigs started as runts and somehow grew into the largest sows anyone had seen — all that scratch-cooking slop and loving care and the particular alchemy of a household where even the smallest creature was expected to thrive. One pig lived in the house as a baby, like a pet, for a while. That was normal. In our house, that was completely normal.
A runt from a litter of half-beagle, half-chihuahua puppies was given to us. Mom named her Rosie for her red-brown fur. She was small and improbable-looking, a genetic compromise that shouldn’t have worked but did. Rosie was Mom’s dog in a way that Dori was ours. She followed Mom everywhere — into the garden, into the kitchen, onto the porch, into the car. She and Dori became good friends, and sometimes Rosie would fall asleep on top of Dori, the chihuahua-beagle using the Labrador as a mattress. When Mom played tickle monster with us, Dori would nip at her arm — not to hurt, just to say that’s enough, those are my children. Mom told us it was because Dori was so protective of us. She was right. The household had its loyalties sorted, and every creature knew exactly who belonged to whom.
Mom sold Avon for a while. I never understood this, and I don’t think she sold much, but she accumulated her own collection — the samples and the castoffs and the things too pretty to let go. Her Avon case lived in the bedroom, full of tangled costume jewelry, necklaces wound around earrings wound around brooches, the whole mass clinking when she opened the lid. It was a treasure box. She would dig through the tangle and extract something — a bracelet, a pin — untangling it with patient fingers, and put it on for church or for going out, and the cheap jewelry became beautiful because she wore it and because she chose it and because choosing was its own kind of adornment.
I remember her getting ready. For church, for work, for any occasion that required leaving the farm. She would leave her hair in curlers under a scarf for hours beforehand, so all that remained was a few minutes with the hair dryer, a cloud of hairspray, and then the careful application of makeup at the bathroom mirror. I would stand in the doorway and watch. The foundation, the blush, the mascara, each step performed with the concentration of someone doing something important. It took me twenty seconds to get ready. I was a beeler. She took her time. I didn’t understand the ritual — what it meant for a woman to compose her face for the world, to build the version of herself the world was allowed to see. I just liked watching her. She was my mother and she was beautiful and the mirror only confirmed what I already knew before she picked up the brush.
We went everywhere with her. Every errand was a family expedition, Helen and me loaded into the car, driven into Green Bay, parked outside whatever store Mom needed, sometimes brought inside, sometimes left in the back seat to wait and watch the world through the window.
The Hostess day-old bakery was a regular stop — discount bread and snack cakes, a day past peak, sold for a buck or two less than the grocery store. I would sit in the car while she went in, staring at the house next door — barely a shack, the kids’ toys scattered in the mud yard, tree roots pushing up through the ground like knuckles, and I would wonder about the children who lived there, what they were like, what games they played with those mud-caked toys, whether their mother brought them Ho Hos too. I would hope she’d bring us one. Sometimes she did.
She would point out the old cannery down the street as we drove past. She’d worked there once, she told us, packing peas. A young woman standing on a line filling cans with green peas for wages I never asked about. That building, decades later, would become The Art Garage — an arts organization where I’ve taught workshops and now sit on the board. The cannery where my mother packed peas became the gallery where her son teaches art. If you stay in one place long enough, the buildings change around you and the stories layer up like paint on a wall that nobody ever scrapes clean.
The neighborhood was called Three Corners for the way the streets came together there. Dehn’s Ice Cream Parlor sat on the corner next to the old cannery, and once in a blue moon, if Helen and I wished hard enough — not asked, wished, because asking was too direct and wishing was the currency of children who knew not to push — Mom would take us in. A cone at Dehn’s was an event. It happened rarely enough that the taste carried weight.
There was Le Captain’s Meat Market, a classic butcher shop where you could get any cut to order — the butcher behind the glass case, white apron, the cold smell of raw meat and sawdust, the transaction conducted in a language of cuts and weights that Mom understood and I absorbed without comprehending. Then Segall’s, an old warehouse that sold discounted overstock food, the aisles stacked high with dented cans and off-brand goods. That was back when generic food had white labels with big black text — CORN, BEANS, PEAS — the packaging stripped of everything except the name, as if the can itself was embarrassed to be there. Mom told us to find the ones that weren’t dented, because dented cans could have botulism. I don’t know if that was true, but it scared me enough that I inspected every can like a bomb technician, turning each one slowly in my hands, looking for the crease that meant death.
Then Willow Street Bakery. Mom told us the street was called Willow before the university was built and they changed the name, and I liked that — the way a name outlasts the thing it was named for, the way a bakery can carry a street’s original identity long after the street signs have been replaced. The bakery is still there. The name is in Spanish now, but the old sign of the baker — the painted figure, the loaf, the image of a trade — still hangs. Names linger. They linger in bakery signs and in the stories mothers tell their children in the car between stops, and the children carry them forward without knowing that’s what they’re doing, until one day they write them down.
Church was the core of her social world, and since we did everything as a family, it was the core of ours.
Central Assembly of God on Sunday mornings. Sunday school before the service. The main service. Home for a few hours, or to Uncle Ken and Aunt Cathy’s for board games. Then the Sunday evening service. Then Wednesday night for family night — the boys to Royal Rangers, the girls to Missionettes, the high schoolers to youth group, the adults to their own service. Mom loved all of it. She was on the prayer chain, where one person would call the next to relay the item needing prayer, a telephone game of intercession that ran through the congregation like a current. She would gather me and Helen to pray for someone’s illness, the three of us in the kitchen with our heads bowed while dinner cooled on the stove. She was always making meals for shut-ins and carrying them to houses and hospital rooms, sitting with the sick and the dying the way she’d been doing since before we were born. We tagged along, not sure what to do, lingering in hallways while Mom held someone’s hand and prayed over them. Everyone knew Betty was good for this kind of ministry.
She had her convictions and she held them tightly. Anti-psychiatry — only God or the pastor could do that work, she believed; the mind was a spiritual matter, not a medical one. Anti-divorce — the Bible was clear. Anti-rock-and-roll, even the Christian kind — to be separated from the secular world meant separated completely, down to the beat and the volume. She would tell people these things in the sweetest, most loving way possible and then say she was praying for them, and the remarkable thing is that it worked — not the theology, but the delivery. I can’t say she made enemies. She was too full of love for anyone to hold a grudge against her for long. The convictions that should have alienated people somehow didn’t, because they came wrapped in a warmth so genuine that you couldn’t resent the package even when you disagreed with the contents. It embarrassed me sometimes, trailing behind her, knowing that the other kids’ parents were the ones she was sweetly correcting. Still. Everyone loved Betty. Everyone.
She and Dad decided to send us to Green Bay Christian School starting in fifth grade. GBCS rented from other buildings — the first location was at Our Lady of Charity center on the far west side of Green Bay. We carpooled with other New Franken families in Mrs. Teagan’s large conversion van. I rode with Helen, Adam Teagan, Isaiah Baker, Amanda Baker, and Mike Skelly — a van full of Christian school kids bouncing across Green Bay every morning while Mom drove us the few miles to the pickup point and told us everything would be fine. Everything was. She was probably elated. Her children were in a place where the values matched the home, and that alignment was worth more to her than any convenience or budget concern.
We visited Great-Grandma Hazel Lau monthly — Mom’s grandmother, in a little house on West Mason Street on the west side of Green Bay, the busiest street I’d ever seen, traffic flowing past in both directions while we turned into a driveway that felt like an escape hatch into another era. The backyard was secluded, fenced, quiet, and Helen and I would play on the swing set while Mom went inside for a long visit. The swing set had a face-to-face rocker, and we would pump it as high as we could, daring the bolts that held it to the frame. Hazel would get cancer and die, and it pained Mom deeply. Her mother’s mother — another woman in the chain, another link lost.
Family was everything to Mom. She made the rounds constantly — visiting her uncles and aunts, most of whom seemed to always be sick, a rolling roster of illness that cycled through the extended family like weather. Cancer. Heart attacks. Strokes. They all succumbed eventually, one after another, and Mom went to every bedside, brought food to every house, attended every funeral. I think this gave me a fatalistic streak — the sense that the body is a temporary arrangement, that illness is always coming, that the people you love will leave in roughly the order you most don’t want them to. Mom reinforced this without meaning to. She would say, sometimes casually and sometimes not, that she was going to go before everyone else. I would tell her that wasn’t true. Don’t be silly, Mom. She was being silly.
Then her father died.
It was my sophomore year, the day after my birthday. A teacher came to the classroom and asked for me, and I followed her into the hallway, and there was Mom. I could see from her body language before she said a word — the way she stood, the way she held her purse, the swollen redness around her eyes — that something had broken. She told me Grandpa had died. In his sleep, a heart attack, up at his cottage near Crivitz. She had been crying for hours already. She told me that dying in your sleep of a heart attack is one of the best ways to go, which is the kind of thing a person says when they are trying to comfort themselves by comforting you.
I got my book bag and we left. We drove north to the cottage to comfort Jennie, Grandpa’s partner, and to bring her back, and to drive his truck and wagon home. It was a long trip. I could see Mom was distraught in a way I hadn’t seen before — not performing grief, not managing it for the benefit of others the way she usually managed everything, but in it, drowning in it a little, the way you drown when the loss is the last person who was supposed to be permanent. Her mother had died before I was born. Her uncles and aunts had fallen one by one over the years, cancer and heart attacks taking them in a slow procession I’d watched from the back seat of the car on the way to hospitals and funerals. Her grandmother Hazel. Now her father, the stonemason, the man who built foundations. The losses had been accumulating in her like stones in a wall, and this one was the keystone, the one that made the weight real.
I was sixteen. I was starting to catch on to aging and disease, to sickness and dying, as much as a sixteen-year-old can — which is to say I understood the facts but not the feeling, the sequence but not the weight. I would learn the weight soon enough. In a few months she would get sick herself. A year after that she would be gone. But on that drive north, I didn’t know any of that. I just knew my mother was hurting in the passenger seat, and that I was old enough to drive the truck home, and that driving the truck home was the only useful thing I could do.
Mom and I stayed close through every year. I missed her whenever I was away from her. She went to Maine once, to visit Deena, and I was physically heartsick — a real ache, a homesickness that was really a mom-sickness, the feeling of the center of your world being temporarily somewhere else. Even when I was out camping or fishing with friends, doing the things a boy is supposed to want to do, I would find myself wishing I could be back home, back in the kitchen, back within range of her voice and her heartbeat and the sound of tires on gravel that meant someone was coming to sit at her table.
She was the center of my life. Whether that was healthy or not is a question I’ve spent decades not quite answering. In high school I started to spread my wings, the way teenagers must, the pulling-away that is necessary and painful and never quite complete. She let me go further than you’d expect from a woman who controlled the television and banned rock music. I traveled with Steve to Key West to go fishing. I went on missions trips across Latin America. She said the reason she could let me go so far was that she knew God would be watching us. She knew it was part of His plan. She said she never worried. I don’t know if that was true or if it was faith performing the role of courage, but it worked — her certainty made me extra diligent to stay safe, to be worth the trust she’d placed not in me but in the God she believed was keeping me. I missed her dearly on every one of those trips. Every single one. But it wasn’t long before she got sick, and the wings I’d been spreading folded back, and I was driving her to chemo in the big Bonneville and pulling over so she could vomit on the side of the road, and the center of my universe was dimming in a way I couldn’t stop and couldn’t look away from.
I wanted many more years with her. I wanted to share her grandchildren with her.
She would have loved my son. She would have spoiled him, the way her own mother never got to spoil me. She would have told him the story about me bouncing in the crib — Mama, it’s time to get up! — and he would have heard it many times, the way I heard the story about her mother’s excitement, and one day, years from now, he would understand why she kept repeating it. The repetition is the love. The love is the remembering. The remembering is all we get to keep.
I don’t have her saddle shoes or her ‘57 Chevy or her Gibson Hummingbird or the Omnichord or the cookie cutters shaped like shamrocks. I have her baby book with the lock of golden hair. I have the photo of her and Bandit the raccoon on the fridge. I have the sound of tires on gravel and the smell of canning steam and the feeling of her heartbeat through her neck while she played cards and the kitchen filled with voices and the coffee went cold because nobody remembered to drink it and nobody cared because the coffee was never the point.
She built the world I grew up in. The farm, the garden, the kitchen table that always had room for one more chair. She built it from a trailer in Preble and fake saddle shoes and a father’s stonework and a mother she lost too soon and a faith so large it embarrassed her son and a love so total it drew strangers up the gravel driveway without an invitation, because everyone knew — everyone in New Franken, everyone at Central Assembly, everyone at the Royal Scot and the Sportsman Club and the prayer chain — that Betty’s house was the place where you would be fed and heard and prayed for whether you asked for it or not.
I didn’t fully understand how she loved me until I had kids of my own. I understood it in theory — the way you understand gravity before you fall. But watching them play, the way they disappear into their own worlds the way I disappeared into mine, the way they look up to check that I’m still there and then go back to what they were building — I get overwhelmed with it. The emotion comes in waves I didn’t expect and can’t control. I watch them and I think: this is how she looked at me. This is what it felt like from her side of the room — the fullness, the terror, the gratitude so large it doesn’t fit inside your chest. Having me was her greatest aspiration. I didn’t understand that sentence until I became the sentence myself.
She called me her beeler. Her goober pea. Her Donny.
I was hers. I still am.