REMEMBERING MOM

My mother, Clementa "Dena" Ricci, died on October 17th, a week after she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. 

I was eating a bowl of apple sauce Sunday night when it hit me: I will never eat another one of mom’s unbelievable apple pies again. Or her blueberry pies. Or her carrot cake. And there will never be another pot roast dinner like the ones mom used to turn out regularly: meat done to perfection, tender and thin sliced, all smothered in onions and carrots. Oh, and an additional three or four vegetables just to round out the meal.

All of us know Mom’s amazing talent with food. All of us kids remember walking up the driveway after school smelling warm bread. All of us know her fried pizza dough, her raisin meatballs and her crispy cream puffs with that melt in your mouth cream filling. It was those cream puffs that sealed the deal between her and my dad. He just had to marry this gorgeous girl who also happened to make cream puffs that were out of this world.

It was hard to give my mom a compliment though. You’d tell her she looked pretty and she would say, “ah le mortigi shegi,” in Italian, “ah the blind people go crazy over me.”

She tickled us with all of her many Italian sayings, we loved them so much that we made a scrapbook out of them – they had the accumulated wisdom of many past generations of Italians.

Things mom loved: babies, brides, broccolilabe and scharoll; (escarole.)

She loved the Virgin Mary, and while she was dying on Friday, we held hands and said the Hail Mary together.

Mom loved making omelets with mint, and tomatoes with eggs, favorites of Michelina, her own mother. Mom loved making all sorts of yeast breads including the eggs in the bread basket for Easter, and the extraordinary panettone she made at Christmas. Thankfully, she taught all of us girls to make it. Mom loved a spic and span house and worked tirelessly to make it gleam. She loved setting the table for breakfast at night before she went to bed.

She loved antiques, and as my sister Holly wrote in her wonderful obituary, ‘“Dee” excelled at stained glass, needlework, and word puzzles, she loved cooking shows and “poking around junk shops, collecting antique furniture, glassware and crockery.”

After mom’s eyesight failed and she couldn’t see the words, she still had an amazing talent for coming up with the right answers to those word puzzles.

Of course mom’s greatest love was for her partner of 66 years, my Dad. They had an incredible marriage and it inspired us to want the same.

I have had a lot teachers in my life teaching me important things, but my first and most important teacher has always been my Mom, because she taught me how to love with her whole heart. Mom had the biggest heart in the world and she shared it with all of her family and friends she loved so fiercely and freely.

And so, Mom is gone in one sense, yes, but in another, she will never die, because her love brought us all here together today and sits with us now. Mom’s enduring gift to us is to know how to love from the bottom to the top of our hearts.

Mom always had a really tough time saying good bye. The day she was diagnosed, mom was crying and she looked in my eyes and said, “I remember making pipe curls in your hair for school and then you would go off and we would wave and wave goodbye.”

As an adult, leaving 152 Sampson Pkway, mom would stand on the porch. We would wave, and then I would peep the horn three times and drive off, mom waving the whole way.

Mom, we don’t say good bye today, we don’t have to because you will be with us all every single day for the rest of our lives. God Bless you Mom, we love you like crazy!

RELYING ON DIVINE ENERGY TO LOCATE OUR WELL!

Maybe you already know what a dowser does.

I had heard of them, I had a vague notion of what they were. But last week, when it got time to dig the well for our new home in Massachusetts, I had a chance to see for myself what a dowser does. I am here to tell you that it is an amazing process.  It makes you understand that there are people out there who can detect planetary energy in the physical world.

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of dowsers: highly sensitive -- or psychically gifted -- people who use divining rods to find water. So says Wikipedia: "Dowsing is a type of divination employed in attempts to locate ground water, buried metals or ores, gemstones, oil, gravesite, and many other objects and materials without the use of scientific apparatus." Read Wikipedia's fascinating history of dowsing -- it's hundreds of years old. It was used in the Vietnam War by Marines trying to detect weapons and tunnels. At some point in history, dowsers were thought to be Satanic.

Meet Craig Elliott,

the dowser who searched our land for water. We met on a sunny October morning, me toting my dog Poco. Craig took us up to the building site (there is no driveway yet) in his four-wheel drive truck. He proceeded to take his instruments out of the back of the truck.

The first instrument has two brass handles, attached to two long pieces of stiff wire.

He began to walk the hillside, holding tight to the handles of his diving rod. The two wires remained parallel to each other for quite a while and then whammo --  the wires went crazy and started swinging left and right, crossing each other back and forth.

He smiled. "It looks like we found water," he said. I just stood there. He never moved his hands. The wires seemed to have a life of their own.

The way Craig describes it, the wires are the antenna and he is the instrument, sensing the water beneath the earth.

"Can I try it?" I asked and he was happy to hand the instrument over to me. I held onto the brass handles and walked back and forth. Nothing happened.

"Don't feel bad," Craig said. "Nine out of ten people cannot do this."

The second instrument is made of white plastic, and is V-shaped. Craig says this instrument used to be made of whalebone but no more.

He sets each branch of the device against his closed eyelids. Then, he scrunches up his face and turns red and to himself, begins to ask what the rate of water flow will be.

He asks himself, "Is it one gallon per minute, is it two gallons per minute and so on." And when the white wishbone points downward, he gets his answer.

Craig -- a third generation dowser -- says he has performed more than 700 divinations, and he has been wrong (meaning there was no water where he said it was) only 23 times.

We will see whether he is right about our water! He says the driller will find water 150 feet down, and the rate of flow will be nine gallons per minute (which is a terrific well!) The person who recommended we use Craig is the engineer who is designing our septic system.

Craig

says his dad was even better at it than he is. He could find objects of all kinds.

And there are dowsers who don't even need instruments. One woman that Craig met at the annual dowser's convention in Vermont uses just her hand to sense the presence of water.

Well, so, the well will be dug within a few weeks. And I will be back to let you know if Craig is right!