A light spring breeze fluttered the faded curtains draping the window as I lay in my bed listening to the sounds and sights of a childhood spring evening. It had been a long cold Maritime winter and even from my bed I could, or imagined I could, see the last of March's snow melting and forming the puddles we kids liked so much. I heard the other children, my brothers and sisters and neighborhood kids laughing in their games of Hide and Seek, or Red Rover, Red Rover. Phrases such as "1,2,3 here I come ready or not" drifted up to add to my longing to be out of that sickbed. The metal headboard of my bed felt cool against my neck as I sat up and leaned back against it. I picked up the Treasure Island book I'd been reading. I wasn't allowed outside but the stories I read took me away to places and lands I'd never been before.

                    I heard my brothers running down the street and through a corner of the window I saw my Dad lumbering up the hill to our house. It was always a race to see who would get to him first.  My older brother Maurice usually won, he was the athelete amongst us. The big prize - to get to carry Dad's lunch box and whatever leftover treasures it might contain. More often than naught it would be the last couple of mouthfuls of cold tea my mother had put in an empty rum bottle for him to drink with his lunch. I knew the sights and sounds so well that they served as my clock and I knew within minutes when my Mom would bring me up a supper or dinner tray. The doctor had said I had pneumonia and I was to be kept in bed covered up and I hated it.

                    I was ten years old that summer and fighting another round of sickness. The room I shared with three of my brothers was stark to say the least. Two iron double beds a dresser and one bare bulb overhead were the only adornments.  Our four sisters shared another room and one of my brother's, John, had a cot in the hallway, the third bedroom was my parents. We had no portable TV's back then and an extra radio was something we just couldn't afford so my sole entertainment was the books beside my bed. Titles like Robinson Crusoe and Huckleberry Finn were common. My favorite was Batt Matterson a story of a Western gun slinging Sherrif. Books were my escape, my way out of that room to places where I could be strong and healthy. I could be a pirate, a cowboy, and a hobo and always be the hero no matter that I was the runt of our family of nine and so often sick.

                    On schedule my Mom entered the room with the tray and a smile. "Sit up now LeRoy and eat your supper" she said laying the tray across my lap. A plate of mashed potatoes covered in canned meatballs and gravy, a slice of homemade bread and a glass of “homemade” milk were on the tray. The canned meatballs and gravy was a regular that summer. My dad had bought a whole case at an auction to stretch our food budget, which during his frequent lay-offs at the shipyards. The milk was a concoction of powdered milk mixed with water and mixed with real milk to make it stretch. Our food budget was usually pretty meager to begin with but Mom did the best she could and came up with some pretty creative meals at times. The bread was homemade and delicious even spread with the dyed lard or margarine; which was much cheaper than butter. Mom said to eat it all my supper and I tried.

                    I remember best the days my Mom would let me spend time with her downstairs after the other kids had went to school. She’d often let me come down once the others had left for school wrapped up in a big old quilt on the couch in the living room. Ah, I can still smell the homemade French fires she'd sometimes cook for me to cheer me up. Those were bittersweet memories of times that still linger in my mind to this day. Times that were shared only between my Mom and I. Times that brought us closer than we would have been if I'd been healthy. I always knew that and valued the way she fretted over me when I was a child. My turn would come to fret over her years later when I grew up. I would watch and wait by her bedside as cancer ravaged her body and turned the Mom I knew to the child I'd been.

                    I use child to describe her, because the worst memory of my life was sitting beside her bed and feeding her baby food coaxing and pleading for her to take one more bite. Like a child she kept a blind faith in her God and a love for humanity that shone through with a radiance that tore at my heartstrings. I remember bargaining with her to take just a few more steps and rewarding her with a wheelchair ride to the maternity ward to see the babies. Oh, how she loved babies.          That was the transformation that took place from mother looking after child, to child looking after parent. In my youth the 15-year gap between the two seemed like forever, now as I near 50 it seems but a flash of time. It isn't much wonder that the two strongest memories of my life were the days I spent as a child being nursed by my Mom and the times when I became an adult and nursed her.