In the Sunrise Hour
In Appalachia, the mornings are quiet all year long.
In the hour before the rays of the sun find the face of Grandfather Mountain, everything is still. The birds wait somewhere high above, dew hovers over lush grass, and the sky seems close enough to touch. The light of sunrise seems to come from nothing and lends pink to the sky in blotches and streaks. In the mornings of my childhood, when I ran barefoot over the ancient ground there, taught to touch my skin to the land, it felt as if the six o’clock stillness was crafted just for my pleasure and sanctity.
In that hour of utter mountain quiet, everything seems right.
It’s the hour in which my mother takes her last breath on the floor of our trailer on a heavy August morning in the early aughts. By the time the sun has risen and the hour is over, the needles have been collected and the thickening summer air is shattered by sirens.
I am six years old, and sleeping with my two-year-old brother in our aunt’s home office on an antique metal daybed that creaks when I move. There’s a hand-stitched quilt that covers us both, like the love in the old patchwork might be enough to protect us. I wake up that morning after the sacred sunrise hour has passed, and the first thing I hear is my aunt’s familiar voice, hushed and whispering on the phone.
My father arrives in the afternoon, and I am unfazed by the social worker who hangs like a now-familiar shadow in the background as he hugs me. I haven’t seen him since May or June, but it’s being painted like a mural of normalcy. I look around for my mother, and I think she’ll be following him into the house any moment. I think of the last time I saw her, of her long, flowered dress with the buttons down the front. I hear her voice. I picture her blond hair and blue eyes, the way she smiles at me even when it’s the first time she’s emerged from the bedroom in days. Even when she takes me out in the middle of the night to an empty parking lot where she pleads with a strange man—I have my daughter with me. Even when she gets back into the car, and takes me to get a peach milkshake, and I’m too young to understand.
My father takes me onto his knee, and when he looks gravely into my face, I see my own brown eyes and dark hair. He is handsome, but graying a little at almost forty-seven, weathered by life. He looks across the room to my aunt—his big sister—just as I am to my own wild and careless little brother, and I look too. She waits in the doorway of her own home, and she looks as much like me as my father does.
Mama’s heart stopped last night, he says to me.
Three days later, while other children start the school year and learn subtraction, I am wearing a flowered dress and learning what it means to be dead. The morning is slipping away when we are all ready to go, and my aunt bends down there in the hallway to look me in the eyes as she presses a cloth handkerchief into my hand.
I don’t need it, I say to her, and she smiles at me like she understands me.
You might, she says.
So I take it, and later we are sitting in a church pew singing old hymns that fall hollow in memoriam to a woman who was barely thirty-five, the mother of two small children. My father’s reddish tanned cheeks are dripping with hopeless tears, and I tap him on his shoulder. He turns his eyes on me, and I quietly hand him the handkerchief.
From the row behind me, my aunt reaches up with her familiar red acrylic fingernails and squeezes my shoulder, and later I will look back and understand that this is when she started to become my mom too.
She takes me to get my ears pierced when I turn seven that December, and I am living with her by January. My father fades away and my uncle steps in. I am still so little, so adaptable. They become my parents as they teach me to sleep in my own bed. She lets me paint my fingernails red like hers, even though I’m only in first grade. When we go to church on Sundays or out to dinner, people smile and tell her that she can’t deny that child, because they think I look just like her.
When I am eight, she takes me shopping, and I choose something with butterflies on it. We go to the courthouse, and I get a new last name to go with my new clothes. I feel satiated, as if my new paper identity might be a balm against my ache to belong.
When I am ten, I take down the photos of my sacred childhood morning hours and pretend that my aunt was always my mom. When I try to throw away these pictures and memories of the mother I lost, the mom I gained is the one to tell me no. She packs them away in a box instead, because she knows me better than I know myself.
When I am thirteen, I go to summer camp in the mountains. My camp counselor distributes letters from home to all of the girls in my cabin, and I take the white envelope bearing my mom’s familiar script with a secret thrill that is only for me. The other girls don’t know that I am different, that I have lost something. I cry reading the letter and find peace in the normalcy of missing a mom that I will go home to when camp is over.
When I am fifteen, I shear off nearly all of my long dark hair and my mom stands behind me in the hair salon mirror and doesn’t complain or question. She knows, I think—or maybe, she just accepts—that I am not her. I am beginning to understand myself that I am neither my mother, nor my mom, but someone entirely my own and a product of their mutual love for me. I am grateful for all of it.
When I am eighteen, I look more like her than ever. I put my high school graduation photo against hers and find them nearly indistinguishable. Her face in my mirror begins to infuriate me, though I am not yet grown up enough to understand this longing for the mother she replaced, the mother that I lost too early and whose features are hard to find in my own. I can’t understand, so instead I decide that I hate her and that she was never my mom at all.
When I am twenty, I move home again. We talk until three in the morning and drink wine together. I paint my fingernails like hers again. We share pints of ice cream, and I slowly remember who I am. My mom doesn’t understand parts of me—my queerness, my ambition, my priorities—but I learn to live with it. I reconcile these parts and exchange them for the parts of me that she understands more deeply than I do. She tells me that nobody will ever love me like she does, and I believe her.
I sleep through it when the ambulance arrives the first time.
She comes home and tells me all about it, and she complains about the nurses, and I know that she’s okay.
The next time, she insists that I help her pack. I do. She’s particular. She never goes anywhere without dental floss, and she’s convinced she’s going to need some of the snacks that she likes. I go to the store to get them and then I pack it all and don’t argue, even though I know that I will unpack it all again when the purple duffle bag comes home without her.
My dad is going to drive her to the hospital this time, but before they go she sits in the kitchen and looks me in the eyes, just like the day she handed me a handkerchief. I am older now, and I understand the way she looks at me.
It’ll be okay, she says, like it’s an instruction. Like all of the others she’s given me, like it’s fold these towels or try again.
I know, I answer.
I do know. I know that I won’t go to the hospital, even at the end. I know that people won’t understand. I know that I will go to work, and walk the dogs, and make food to freeze so that we’ll have it when my brother and sister come home and the house is full, but empty without her. I know that I will clean and try to be who she would want me to be.
She hugs me tight, and mostly I know that she understands.
The sound of my dad’s car starting reaches us, muffled by thin walls. It’s time to go. I tell her to call me when they get there, and we both know that it’s the last time we’ll see each other.
And we both know that it’ll be okay.
It’s the end of March, sixteen years later, when morning comes again. I wake up in the quiet of the early Appalachian dawn, and for a moment it feels just the same. I am in an antique bed in her house, with an old quilt, and the hour of mountain stillness has just passed. But this time when I open my eyes, I hear nothing at all.
My dad tells me, but I have known since sunrise.
I am not six anymore, and this time, there is no one to tell me what I might need. Instead, I go into her bedroom and open a little box, searching for a delicate lace handkerchief. When I find it, I close my eyes and press it into my hand, and then I look into the mirror and there they are.
My mother’s round shoulders, my mom’s dark eyes. My mother’s teeth, my mom’s coarse dark hair. My mother’s waist, my mom’s pink skin. In so many ways, I am neither of them. And yet, somehow, I am both of them, and we are all here.
Together, we just keep waiting for morning.
Cassie Mattheis (she/her) (@cassiemattheis) is a queer newcomer essayist, poet, and memoirist from the heart of Appalachia who prides herself on representation and authenticity in her work. She has been featured as the writer of essays on Native American representation in media, aspirational politics in television, and LGBTQ+ history in theater. She currently writes from the western coast of France.