My mother believed in being prepared for absolutely anything.

And I mean anything. One evening, I hit my head on a marble nightstand hard enough to end up with a concussion. By the next day, my best friend had taken one look at me and decided I needed to go to the emergency room. Turns out…she was right. After several hours in the ER, medications, discharge instructions, and me feeling somewhere between dizzy and pitiful, my best friend drove me home and called Mother to ask if she could pick up my prescriptions from Walgreens. Of course Mother agreed. Because if there was ever a situation where my mother could step in and take care of somebody, she absolutely would.
A little while later, she arrived at my house carrying several Walgreens bags inside.
I went on to lie down while my best friend started unloading everything from the bags.
Now naturally there was:
chicken noodle soup, Waverly crackers, ginger ale, and my prescriptions.
All the standard Southern recovery essentials.
But then my best friend stopped and held something up.
She looked over at my mother and asked,
“Did you buy this for yourself?”
Mother said,
“No… why?”
My best friend started laughing.
Because sitting there in the middle of all my “get well soon” supplies… was a bottle of Clorox Cleanup.
To this day, I honestly do not know what exactly Mother thought was about to happen.
Maybe she assumed concussions caused messes.
Maybe she thought somebody might throw up.
Maybe she simply never trusted sickness without disinfectant nearby.
But that bottle of Clorox Cleanup somehow made perfect sense to her. And honestly?
That story sums up my mother beautifully.
She may not always have approached things conventionally… but she showed up every single time.
That last line is important because it turns a funny story into something emotionally meaningful.