The self-reliance built from growing up amid such a hardscrabble landscape stayed with my mother. By high school she was sewing her own outfits, a skill that would last a lifetime.
The Mountain Lion in My Mother’s Closet
“What’s that smell?” I asked my mother one recent Saturday. A rubbery odor was coming from the room once known as my mom’s study, now converted to swing housing for my brood when we visit. Laid out on the table was the partially constructed skeleton of what appeared to be a large cat, diagrams tacked to the wall, small bones sorted into glass bowls. The faint scent of burning tires wafted from a glue gun.
“It’s a mountain lion,” she said, getting to the point. None of the kids slept there that night.
My mother—a geneticist who ran her own lab for decades at Columbia University and Tufts University before that—has always kept a collection of scientific paraphernalia in the house: lab beakers in the kitchen cabinets, microscopes in the garage, Darwin’s complete works in the living room. The walls of her study looked like a collage torn from Birds of America. There were animal skins in the closet, inky-dark creatures preserved in yellowing glass on the bookshelves.
She’d carried this particular specimen with her for years. In college, she worked in a vet school lab to supplement her scholarship money, cataloging bones, painting sections of giraffe skulls, sketching anatomical figures for the students to identify. Home one summer, she asked her father for a skeleton that she could build and label for herself. A professional hunter, he often kept the skins of the animals he killed, fed the meat to the dogs, and threw the bones out amid the sagebrush. He happened to have just tossed a mountain lion into the desert near the house, so she went out to retrieve it—and then kept it for 40 years.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Chloe Schama
