I opened the door of the old farmhouse very gently, and there she sat by the stove, in an old rocking chair. She was mending a sock: the heavy kind that men wear around the farm, though there were no longer any men folk about. I looked at that little old lady long and hard… and tears came into my eyes. Why had been so long? She seemed so very small… so fragile… so terribly weary… and as her fingers worked slowly with the wool, weaving it over the hole in the sock, the roughness would catch the fibers of the wool and she'd frown a little and glance at those wrinkled little hands. I had to come home. It had been three… no, four years. I had just returned from the concrete jungles of the city… the boulevards of big schemes and broken dreams… my own world of board rooms… cocktail parties… sleeping pills to go to sleep… stimulants to wake up… the mad main street of big business where the mark of success was the loss of identity in a gray flannel suit… where even your name was shortened to just two initials. I had thought myself a success coming out in my new car. The big man comes home. I had thrown behind me modest birth… the uncolored background of a simple farm boy and had broken the $20,000 barrier at 37. And then I saw her… my mother. I looked down upon this gentle little woman, who in her 82 years had tilled the soil beside her man, gathered eggs… milked cows… spun wool… carried chop… drove a team at thrashing time… cooked for all the hands… and raised 12 babies, not counting three that died. And what did she have to show for it? What has she got from all those years of backbreaking work? What has life left this little old lady in the rocking chair? Again I studied her as she sat there; again, tears came to my eyes and then it came to me. My mother, there in the rocking chair… 82 years old… is a very happy woman for she has the one thing I so badly need and will never have. She has peace of mind… she has serenity.
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