It’s been nearly four years since I placed flowers on my mother’s grave in a visit to a peony-strewn cemetery in Mandan, North Dakota.
I so miss her, a monumental figure in my life buried beneath the Ritchey family headstone in view of the once mighty Missouri River.
If all goes well, I will visit next month on Mom’s 104th birthday — a “June” born in June, the young woman in the sepia-colored 1943 Christmas photo next to my bed holding 1-month-old me, the eldest of her four daughters she called “Mike, Pat, Jac and Jo.”
I would not meet my World War II soldier father until I was standing upright in a walker in late 1944. U.S. Army Air Corps Master Sgt. Richard E. Sneed was busy as a turret gunner atop his Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber.
Dad would die in 1978, a life interrupted by war and cut short when he was only 63 years old. He would make three final requests of mother shortly before he died: Be happy. Marry again. Promise to be buried next to him.
June Ritchey Sneed would happily marry again, but in 2006 she was indeed buried next to Dad in North Dakota, far from the Chesapeake Bay of my father’s youth in Maryland.
Now that I am 80 years old and climbing an actuarial table, Mom’s memory blossoms in my garden of her favorite pale pink roses, creeping into the quiet of my living room at dusk. I’m flooded with memories of her boundless affection, strict but quiet parenting, and some of the questions I had failed to ask.
She was forever and unconditional when it came to love. I was so lucky.
Later, my sisters and I discovered while we all loved her, we knew her differently, each of us a repository of a special secret or fact unbeknownst to the others.
“Never put in writing what you don’t want anyone to read,” Mom once told me.
And I became a journalist?
Parse that.
On a Mother’s Day years ago, I wrote:
“The hero of my young life, Mom was a confidante; a teacher, a traveling companion, a partner in crime, a sharer of secrets, a most favorite voice at the end of a phone line.
“In my dreams, mother is always in the background, but she is always there — just as she was in life. Laughing at someone’s joke, but never having the nerve to tell one.
“Acting like an intermediary, rather than the boss. Beige instead of red. But always true blue.
“Alzheimer’s would claim her life. Later, I would bind every letter she wrote to me in pink ribbon.”
Did I mention Mom is buried next to a field of sunflowers, whose faces eventually point toward the sun in summer?
So on this special day of maternal remembrance, I will once again recite Mom’s favorite poem, “Little Orphant Annie” by James Whitcomb Riley, as my sisters and I did when we buried her near Dad on a lovely September day amid the flutter of wild turkeys, and a prairie wind which, thankfully, chose to be quiet that morning.
And once again, this June, I will place pale pink roses on her grave … and step a few feet away to thank my Dad for having the good sense to marry the woman he always called his “wild prairie rose.”
No kidding …
The Trump kids! The shocking appearance of Hope “Deny. Deny. Deny” Hicks, Donald Trump’s devoted White House press chief/prosecution witness in his hush money trial, was also a stunner given what former top Trump aide Corey Lewandowski told Sneed shortly before Trump won the 2016 presidency.
“Hope and I were not only regulars on the Trump [2016] campaign plane,” said Lewandowski, “but were seatmates regularly referred to and frequently summoned by Trump as ‘the kids.’ ”
“He was like a father figure,” Lewandowski said of Trump, describing their absolute devotion to him from the get-go.
Sneedlings …
Be still my tongue: Britain’s “estranged” Prince Harry told the BBC he was happy to be back in London attending a charity event wearing a bucket on his head while teams of children threw plastic balls at his topper. … The City Club of Chicago just added top femme powerhouses as new board members: CEO of R4 Services Trish Rooney, the Obama Foundation’s Lori Healey and the University of Chicago’s Jennie Huang Bennett.
Saturday birthdays: singer Eric “The Animals” Burdon, 83; actor Francis Fisher, 72; rapper Ace Hood, 36. … Sunday birthdays: actor Gabriel Byrne, 74; Stephen Baldwin, 58; actor Rami Malek, 43, and a belated birthday to writer John Gorman, 80.
