My mother and my father drive away the next morning. They head through the countryside north toward Lisbon. My mother is wearing flared black,woolen trousers with thick cuffs and a turtleneck. She has on the new Portuguese traveling jacket with fringe on the bottom that my father has bought her. It is hand woven. It is green and black. The jacket my mother is wearing is simply her imaginative sense of things. My mother is just so beautiful as she leaves Sagres in her green and black traveling jacket. My mother is not sad this morning. My mother has emptied her sadness into the well that is close to spilling over …but not yet. I wave good-bye to my mother. I am invisible to her. My mother has left me behind in her record of memory of things she has said and things she has not said. In that record of memory now my own is a bud that begins to open only in the middle of the night …an understanding that reveals itself in the fullness of the pale blossom and its subtle fragrance just before the first light comes.

That understanding revealing itself in that pale blossom before the first light comes is this. My father will never break my mother’s yearning for the distilled fragrance of the elusive. My father will never break the delicate treasure he cannot understand. How can that be you ask? Here is what I can say to you.  My mother has the same courage as a delicate flower. Her orange zinnia petals will pant in the hot sun of August. The yellow tulip of her will push herself up shivering from the frozen ground in March on the first sunny days. That is what I can say to your question about why my father will never break what he cannot understand in my mother.

There is something else in my mother’s record of memories. There is hope.  My mother will always hope that my father will protect the distilled fragrance of the elusive in her. She will never give up that hope.  My mother will tell me that.  She will also continue to hold to her claim that she will love my father until death will take her. My mother will tell me that, too.  I wonder, though.  Did she grow weary of that claim?  How can I know? Did she give up her illusions of hope?  Is there only silence that will never provide an answer at the end of her story?

One night she will leave. What had once seemed unimaginable is difficult, but no longer impossible. She simply leaves in the middle of the night. She has navigated past her own Green Sea of Darkness. The next morning she will call my father to tell him that she is gone.  There will be no dance across the floor with the fore and middle fingers of my father’s powerful hand beating the accelerating rhythm on her broken heart. I will be a bride when she leaves. My mother will come to live in the house where I am a bride.

My mother will never travel again. My mother will never dress up to go to dinner with my father in strange places.  You may ask these questions, “Did it  matter to her that she had remained with my father for almost an entire life time? Did she feel free at the end? Did her heart heal?”  I cannot answer these questions for her.  What I know is this… she will walk out into the field gathering flowers. She will carefully press them into a collection of whimsical books. She will gather seeds and nuts, pine needles and bark and fill the house with their natural essence. My mother will search for true oils to scent them. The true oils my mother seeks will not overpower as if to announce themselves. They will be true oils of the most subtle essences. Sometimes we will go together and walk along a wild wisteria vine that grows across an unbridled expanse and feel our closeness in its fragrance. My mother will allow me into her quiet world and make me see why she has gone there. Will she be at peace …will she have joy in the woods and the fields? Perhaps she did, because it is in those places I will find peace and joy myself. That is the only thing I can tell you about my mother.

My mother will die in the house I came to as a bride. She will tell me that death will come to her from what is running rampantly awry in her body. I will go to her sitting room the same night that she has told me about what is the future that will become her death. I will talk to her as she sits in her wingback chair. She will be sitting in the twilight with a book of poems in her lap. The glow from a marble lamp on the polished wooden table softens the room. It is March and the wind through the branches of the towering tree next to the house tap the window. The bare branches of the towering tree next to the window already have red and green buds. It will be my mother’s last spring. It will be my last spring with my mother. I tell my mother that I am sorry for my anger the night she planted tomatoes in the garden. She will look at me with a strange glint as tears course down my cheeks. She will ask me, “What is it you think you did? I cannot remember that night.” My mother smiles at me. I feel some of the bitterness that is my strength fall away from my heart. It doesn’t happen all at once. It will take years. My bitterness will fall away little by little. A hope for sweetness will come into its place. My hope for the sweetness coming is that it will have its own kind of strength.

I feel bitterness leave me as I turn away from the sea and walk back to the pousada. I ask myself what my mother gave me. I ask this question. An answer returns. I am free. The freedom my mother gave me is the enduring courage she found in a delicate flower …a final freedom without bitterness.

My mother gave me freedom from my first breath, because she knew she had not ever really been free. My mother created in me a heart of love that could not be bound. She protected it in a secret field of flowers growing wild where no one who would try to break it could they ever really find it. I would know what it was like to run wild in that field with the wind through my hair chasing butterflies and bees …only stopping to pick a bouquet of buttercups with uneven and broken stems that I would bring back to her.  I would know what it feels like for the delicate flower in me to be tended and protected against any bad thing that could happen. Bad things would happen, of course. There would be times of troubles. Bitterness would come …but then, with time, I would wriggle free again and would fall away into the memory of a secret field of flowers growing wild.

My mother delivered me and gave me up to the world unbound.

What my mother wanted for me is written in the heart’s secret language on the flyleaf page of a book in a box in the room of the things I have kept. In that book is an obscure map much like her own elusive essence. This elusive essence is found in Sagres. The essence of Sagres is the fragrance of my mother. I have my own elusive fragrance. My essence contains all the elements of my mother’s fragrance and much of what has become my own.

My mother’s fragrance is a breath that whispers, “Be free.”

I am free without bitterness. The love in my heart cannot be bound.