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We drove back to the parking lot where we’d left the trucks and my mother. We had found a motel in Portland after driving in a snowstorm from the Seattle area.

She was driving the cargo van up and down the lot. “What is she doing?” I asked myself which was my habit ever since I’d invited her back into my life 3 years before. She informed me proudly she was tamping down the snow so we could drive on it. Gee, Thanks mom I said, teeth chattering and wondering how this 83-yr- old was faring through all this travel.

Then she was standing there in the snowstorm, This unforgettable image pressed itself into my mind. I write it down now, to keep her alive because I loved her. The white flakes fall upon white hair. She’s not wearing her curly wig today. A thin jacket covers her body, she wears her usual slippers. My mother, the trucker who keeps on truckin.’ My mother,ignoring

death creeping up on her. No retirement plan, no savings, just some old furniture and two old trucks to her name and a little social security. I might mention here she had failed her driver’s test for popping my clutch too hard and grinding the gears. We were driving mother home. It was my sister’s turn to watch over her.

We pulled our 3-vehicle caravan off the road into a small shopping area. We left mother sitting in the passenger seat of a monstrous cargo-van, 1978 issue. She hated being left there while we searched for a motel in the blizzard. Mother refused to get into the car with us; She was clinging onto these trucks because she thought they were valuable and she planned on giving them to my brother before she died, I could see her point, although it didn’t make me comfortable to leave her there. We had driven around unfamiliar back streets with no turnaround for a large truck so we parked them. It was the only safe thing to do in a storm. “Mom I said, get in the warm car, we’ll leave the trucks here until morning. It’s Saturday night, no one will be working tomorrow and they won’t bother the trucks. It’s snowing, I’m cold and tired, we’ve just driven 200 miles, get in the warm car and we’ll drive 2 blocks up the road. I’ve already purchased 2 rooms for the 4 of us.”