Mama was a worrier.

Daddy said if Mama didn’t have something to worry about, she would go across the road and borrow something.

I could just picture Mama walking across the road with a cup in her hand to borrow a worry from Miss Loretta.

I found a cartoon with a picture of an old lady sitting in a rocking chair. The caption read: Some folks say worryin’ don’t help none. I know it don’t because nothin’ I ever worried about ever happened. Mama laughed.

Worrying was not anything that I inherited from Mama.

That’s why I wasn’t really worried when I took Mama for a follow-up visit with Dr. Zumstein in May 1994. She hadn’t been feeling well and wasn’t eating. But then, Mama always ate like a little bird.

I grabbed a blue speckled, enamel bucket and tossed it in the backseat of the car. We were going blackberry picking after we left the doctor’s office.

Mama could make the best blackberry pies in the world and, being as neither of us wore dentures, we could eat the seeds. Mama said the seeds didn’t agree with her but “a blackberry pie’s not a blackberry pie without seeds,” she would laugh and say.

Things didn’t go as planned at the doctor’s office that day.

I knew the news was bad when Mama came out of the “back” and walked straight through the door.

“What is it, Mama? What’s wrong?” I said chasing after her.

“It could be cancer,” she said without looking at me.

At that one moment, my whole world fell apart.

A sad, worried silence filled the car on the way home. The only sound was the rattling of the handle on the blackberry bucket.

When we pulled in the driveway, Mama looked in the backseat and said, “We forgot to get the blackberries.”

You don’t pick blackberries in a Blackberry Winter, a late-spring cold spell that follows the blooming of the blackberry “bushes.” A cold spell came into my heart on that warm, sunny May day, and it lingers there today

Mama died on January 14, 1995. I’m still waiting for the healing hand of time to ease the hurt that came to me during the Blackberry Winter of 1994.

My grandmother, Mama’s mother, planted “outhouse roses.” Over time, they disappeared until one brave, thorny outhouse rose came crawling along the ground. the same rose that gave us pink roses for Mother’s Day.

“Why do you ‘worry’ about these roses?” my son asked.

“Like Granny. Just borrowing a worry,” I said.

In its simple splendor, an outhouse rose is a reminder that, after a Blackberry Winter, comes the spring – where sweet memories linger.

So, on this Mother’s Day, I’ll borrow a phrase from Lewis Grizzard, “Hug your mama today. I sure wish I could hug mine.”