I have phantom fuzz.

“You have WHAT?” said the Preacher, when he walked into the bedroom and found me inspecting my left foot.

“Phantom fuzz.”

Toe jam. You know. Dead skin, sock fluff, sand, dirt. All mixed up with accumulated skin oils and bacteria.  A piece or collection of pieces of something nasty that has, for too long, homesteaded in the crack between my baby left toe and the one that snuggles up to it.

At first I didn’t pay much attention. A nuisance, that’s all. I prepared to evict it. But when I took off my socks, it had vanished.

Well, then. Must have fallen out on its own.

But the next afternoon it came back. And showed up again the following morning. (Come to think of it, it NEVER shows up. It feels up. And keeps doing so.)

It has taken weeks to get to this point. I don’t believe in ghosts or phantoms, but saints above, I do believe my left foot is haunted.

See, I told you. I have phantom fuzz.

In a great gush of words, I explained all that to my sweet husband as he stood there in our room this morning. Watching with great interest as his spiritual and highly sensible wife, chattering like a magpie on steroids, excavated between her toes. Mining for toe jam. Fool’s jam, it seems.

Well, so. And it’s really not as comical as he seemed to think it was. Or you either. In fact, the only positive thing I can find about all this is that my phantom fuzz doesn’t have the fragrance of real toe jam—which at its ripest smells like a rather pungent cheese. Limburger, I think.  Shockingly odorous.

Some people are utterly incapable of recovering from the smell of Limburger cheese. I know such a person, one victim of a college prank played by a friend. She stuffed Limburger cheese in his dormitory radiator. Eventually the college relocated. Whether the two events were related, I can’t say, but the Preacher has never gotten over it.

“A smell likened to rotting feet or moldy boots,” reads one description of Limburger cheese. And since the bacteria that develops cheese is identical to the stuff that grows between one’s toes, that’s not surprising at all.

Which is why I thank God that my fuzz is a phantom. I own nothing of the sort that my traitorous brain tells me I do.

Better that than phantom gold. Numismatist (fellow who knows coins) Patrick Heller makes a well-evidenced argument in an article at Numismaster.com (April 6/10) that most people who invest in gold own nothing of the sort. They do own, however, very costly paper. There’s simply not enough gold in the world to deliver.

Phantom fuzz is one thing. But we all have some version of phantom gold—stuff we imagine keeps us secure and worth something.

Stinks like Limburger to God, I suspect. Shockingly odorous.

Sweet Jesus, exorcise our phantoms.

Mothers do many things. Grandmothers, too.  One of the hardest is explaining death to those who have barely begun to live.

“Nana, wanna come and see a dead robin?” Benjamin asked.

“Sure, I’ll come.”

“Wobbin can’t fwy,” said Dinah Jane.

“It’s in the GARBAGE!” said Tabatha.

Their mother and I accompanied the three pre-schoolers to the death site, just outside large glass church doors. The bird must have seen the sky reflected there.

I imagine its last moments. The upward swoop. An eager rush toward freedom. Toward a mirage. A flight to the death, though it couldn’t have known it.

In the novel Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Fletcher Seagull slams into a cliff while taking flying lessons—and prematurely lands in another world. “The trick, Fletcher, is that we are trying to overcome our limitations in order, patiently,” says Jonathan, who has followed. We don’t tackle flying through rock until a little later in the program.”

Perhaps the robin tackled something she wasn’t ready for. Perhaps it found instead, another world, I thought for a moment—hoped for a moment. For surely the God who sees sparrows fall sees falling robins too. Especially the ones battered by the church.

But today it was my grandbeans who found themselves in another world.

Their father had picked the bird up from where it had fallen. Its body, designed to do things no human being can (though not for crashing through the doors to God’s house), now lay on a platform built for garbage disposal.

“Wobbin can’t fwy!” Dinah repeated, peering through the wooden slats. Benjamin bent a long time over the edge, staring. Tabatha fidgeted, reluctant to look.

The robin lay on its back, a dejected clump of ruffled feathers. Feet extended, eyes half closed, staring with almost a shocked expression at the sky where it should have been swooping. Singing.

We stood beside the little body and talked a bit. About the God who cares about the lesser things that die flying. (And the people who die trying, I think.) For a heartbeat we remained as still as the robin itself.

Then faith brought up a prayer.

I barely know who uttered it. My daughter and I were two mothers together, watching our beloved offspring grapple with an impossible definition. Death: a terrible stillness. That “wobbin can’t fwy” and will never fly again. That kind of lesson demands that a mother talk to Father in heaven—because she knows there are harder ones coming.

“Lord, I think you don’t like seeing your little bird like this. She shouldn’t be here, and we don’t understand why. But we know you see her, and are sorry too. Thank you that other robins still sing. Amen.”

The Beans left, satisfied.

One day, they’ll understand more about death. All they need to know today is that it happens. That God cares. And birds still sing.

Perhaps that’s all any of us need to know. God may tell us the rest—later in the program.

My mother, (God bless her unbuttoned heart) never encouraged me in the kind of relationships that would make me a mother myself.

Consider this entry in my childhood diary. I was ten years old.

Dear fiancé,

I don’t know who you are or even if I’ll ever have you but if I do I hope you like pets.  I have three. One is a hamster.  We could clean out his cage together.

I also hope you would never want to hug or kiss because I don’t like that stuff.

The other day my mommy and me were looking out the window and we saw a couple lying on the grass together kissing and hugging and my mommy said it looked awful and I said that I thought it looked awful too so then me and my three friends got the garden hose out and turned the cold water on and sprayed the couple and got them wet.

What fun!

Sincerely, Kathy

Somehow that diary entry escaped its pages, and almost ten years later dropped in at my wedding. After our emcee revealed this bit of embarrassing literature to our guests, he, clearly relishing the moment, presented me with a gift. A squirt-gun. Then he went into some great length of detail on how I was to use it. In case the Preacher ever became amorous.

I didn’t need the lesson: my mother had already taught me.

Ahem, ahem. Two children, and three grandchildren later, it seems obvious: I misplaced the squirt-gun. Mom forgave me the instant she laid eyes on our babies.

At ninety-one, her mind as sharp as her best paring knife, but her plucky little body ravaged by a quarter century of ill health, Mom prays fervently for all her progeny. She wishes we could live closer, she says. And she urges me to not work too late at night, get plenty of rest, and take good care of the Preacher.

“Are you cooking him good meals?” she asks sometimes, when I visit her in Chilliwack.

“Mother. Does it look like he’s starving?” I ask her.  She giggles.

One day I mix a batch of her favourite cookie dough to freeze. She watches. I leave the room for just a moment. When I return, there she stands, grinning. Rolling the dough into balls, and with a sharp flick of her wrist tossing them onto the freezing-sheet across the table. As though they were pebbles, and she a child on the shore.

She giggles at my laughter. Later, with excruciating difficulty—her shoulders have come unraveled—she raises her arms. Cradles my face in both hands. Looks me in the eye. Says I’m a wonderful daughter and she loves me, and am I eating enough?

My mother (God bless her generous, unbuttoned heart) doesn’t use words much. But for over five decades, she’s been my North Star in life and faith, humour and wit, mothering and grandmothering.

When I grow up, Lord…

Yeah, just like her.