HOLLY NADLER

508-274-9239

(hollynadler@gmail.com)

It’s been said before, but Mother’s Day isn’t truly for mothers. It’s for florists and chocolatiers, and we all know any number of nice florists and chocolatiers whom we wish well and hope that they prosper every year on that special Sunday in May. In fact, according to news accounts, on this past Mother’s Day, these retailers made out, if not like bandits, then at least like professionals who have good reason to continue plying their agreeable trades.

For actual mothers, the holiday causes a degree of self-consciousness that can almost make one wince. When your kids are little, their teachers insure that gifts are forthcoming: plaster-of-Paris molds of tiny hands, poems tucked into cards. The mothers themselves can, if they choose, ride herd over the occasion, with reminders of the upcoming event, and agreements made with dads on the order of, “You’re going to take me to brunch, right?”

But once our kids journey off into the world, our maternal hormones continue to flow, not from gifts enforced by the floral, chocolate, and Hallmark industries, but by regular calls and e-mails, of being the first to hear a piece of good news, of real face-to-face visits when a day is set aside to catch up, of old private jokes and new ones concocted, of a grown child’s coming to sit beside you and to rest his or her head on your shoulder.

Thus for me it was a moment of startling synchronicity to run into Sharon Coogan last Sunday at Donaroma’s annual Pink and Green Festival. I’d been scooped up by my friend, Gwyn MacAllister, who lent me a pink scarf to swirl above a linen dress that could vaguely be construed as green. Gwyn found for herself a khaki jacket and a pink-and-white checked fedora. (She said she also housed in her closet a pink polyester blazer and kelly green polyester trousers, but I offered her five bucks not to wear that particular outfit.)

So there was Sharon, standing in a blaze of potted azaleas. Sharon had also landed at this festive event accidentally. She had dropped round at Mahoney’s to pick up a forsythia plant for her sister, Jackie, and at that nursery they told her they were clean out of forsythias and to try Donaroma’s, where Sharon had no idea she would find elaborate pink and green decorations in silk and damask, punch and cupcakes, and a flower fairy with an elaborate headdress of spring blossoms.

It’s always a joy to see Sharon whose ready smile and unshakably good nature could cheer up the most determined curmudgeon. And it did seem extra fortuitous to run into her on that day, since our years of early motherhood overlapped so completely.

We lived a few lanes away from each other in East Chop, and Sharon conceived Catie some five months before I came up with Charlie. Sometimes I caught glimpses of Sharon strolling along the shore with sister in law, Liza, who then resided on Bridge street with husband, Eddie, and their three tykes, Willy, Geoghan, and Nell. Once I too became pregnant, Sharon and I would occasionally together walk our bellies along the Chop.

After I gave birth, Sharon came to see us in the hospital with baby Catie who, memorably, peed on her mom’s blouse; somehow the diaper had shifted and, well, welcome to motherhood was the unspoken message which caused Sharon and me to burst out laughing. A couple of years later Sharon gave birth to Packy, and when the kids were old enough to go into business together (Catie and Charlie had entered second grade), the three of them ran a lemonade stand every Memorial Day weekend, the most lucrative one set up at the corner of Park and New York avenues. Sharon and I would drop off pizzas and sandwiches to keep the little entrepreneurs going, and later we learned the lemonade barons sold off what they didn’t eat for extra loot.

But the biggest Coogan/Nadler tradition took place every first Monday in July when the three kids and the two moms would hop on their bicycles and pedal into Vineyard Haven for the street fair. One year Catie won a live goldfish at a bean bag toss, and we had to figure out how to cycle the new pet safely home to East Chop. In the morning we got the news that the tiny swimming prize had gone belly-up to fish heaven.

There were also school events, spaghetti nights, birthday parties. For kids, with any luck, the years go past in a reasonably happy haze. For mothers, the raising of children seems to take place in all of two weeks.

Mothers and children love each other with equal passion, but in different ways, and in different directions. The children are always looking forward to the next moment or some future great event, while mothers, to quote Fitzgerald are “bourne ceaselessly back into the past.”

At Donaroma’s, Sharon and I made a pact to commemorate the next Tisbury Street Fair by meeting in East Chop and bicycling in together. We didn’t have to speak the obvious, that even if our three grown kids were physically on the Island that night, they would have far too many plans to spare the time for, or a nod to that old, abandoned outing. But Sharon and I were up for it, and we promised to follow through this coming July.

“But Sharon,” I called out to her after she’d begun to leave in pursuit of a forsythia. She turned back with a bemused smile. “What if we cry all the way into Vineyard Haven?”

She considered this with characteristic benevolence and understanding. “We probably will,” she agreed.

So happy belated Mother’s Day, all!

Oak Bluffs selectman and animal lover, Kerry Scott wishes to pass along thanks to Russell Smith, his assistant, Martina, the Dukes County Commissioners, and Noreen Flanders (for her help in setting up tax-deductible donations) to bring together the new animal shelter in place of the old MSPCA. If you’d like to pitch in for future involvement, call Lisa (Dawley Burke) Hayes, manager at the shelter, at 508-627-8662.

At the Oak Bluffs Library on Thursday, May 21 at 6 p.m. there will be a screening of Matzo & Mistletoe, produced by Kate Feiffer, a long-awaited documentary that’s already received excellent notices.

Which reminds me . . . mazel tov to Judith and Victor Linn of New York and Oak Bluffs, whose grandchildren, Zachary and Emily Linn will celebrate their bar and bat mitzvahs this coming May 16 at the Woodlands Community Temple in White Plains, New York. The whole family will be on Island in August to visit Judith and Victor on Windemere Road for beaching, reading, and tennis at Farm Neck.