Essence of Mom

In my late 20s, 4 months pregnant with my first child, I returned to my hometown library in search of my mother. The stirrings of my baby, like the flutter of butterfly wings, had roused in me a nagging fear that my mother, who had slowly faded from my thoughts before pregnancy, was slipping away entirely. Most disturbing was the realization my child would not know her. With it came a sense of urgency to learn more about the accident, 20 years earlier, that had taken her life. I'd followed that pull from Maryland to Ridgefield, New Jersey, wondering if I would find her again in the place she had left us.

Entering the maroon brick building transported me back in time. Here was the same hulking old brown wooden card catalog and the now diminutive metal water fountain where I had once struggled with the coordinated action of stepping on the foot pedal while standing on tiptoes to sip water. I told a gray-haired librarian I was looking for the local newspaper from 1970, and she led me to a side room full of microfiche machines that had clearly seen better days.

After my mother died, I often could be found at the library. I was 10 years old then, and loved everything about the place: the way the light shone in from the huge windows, the weight of a book in my hand, the way the paper felt against my fingertips, the quiet meeting rooms, even the musty smell that filled the shelves. Here I could completely lose myself in a world of romance and adventure, be transported to faraway places. But this room where grown-ups had unspooled reels and loaded slides into carousels had always been a mystery to me.

The librarian demonstrated how to load the microfiche into the viewer and how to move the film around to find past articles, then she left me to my task.

“Good luck!” she said as she walked out of the room.

My eyes blurred as the years flew by. I slowed down as I reached 1970. Even more slowly I scrolled. January … March … April. I noticed the headline for the Apollo 13 landing on