The Pippa

When we were little, my mom would randomly drive my brother and me to a gas station, hand us each five dollars, and say, "Okay. Ready? One, two, three."

That was the whole game. On "three," we flew out of the car and had to spend all five dollars as fast as we possibly could. For two glorious minutes, that gas station belonged to us. It never occurred to us that other mothers weren't doing this — which is how you know a childhood is working.

Her name is Jane. To me, she's Mama. And to my son Grey, she's Pippa — the name he gave her, which she wears like a title she won.

Here's the thing I know about my mom that took me forty years to say properly: she has never once consoled me when she could mobilize instead. When art school deferred me at nineteen and I was crushed, she didn't tell me everything happens for a reason — she found a photography workshop in Paris and got me on a plane. When my first marriage ended, she gave me Santa Fe: six months of desert light and quiet until I could hear myself again. And once, when I was a teenager crying at the end of a sad movie, she looked at me for a moment… and dumped her entire glass of water on both of us. We laughed until we couldn't breathe.

She doesn't sit with you in the sad. She comes and gets you.

In 2020, on my birthday, she called to tell me it was cancer. I've written elsewhere about what walking beside her through that taught me — about beauty, about dignity, about why a scarf is never just a scarf. What I'll tell you here is how it ended: she beat it. Of course she did. She has never once let anyone else decide how one of her stories ends.

Now, a confession: this design took me years. I froze every single time. How do you fit the most important person in your life into a single square of silk? Every draft felt too small.

Then one Christmas she was in town, and we finally just… sat down and designed it together. Of course that's how it happened. The scarf about the woman who never let me struggle alone was never going to be something I could make alone.

We made us giraffes — a mother and her baby, looking up at each other across a Santa Fe sunset. The tall one is her. The little one is me. That part needed no discussion. And the words are in there twice, at two different volumes: hidden small beside the little giraffe, right where only people who know her would look — make memories. And spelled out in letters so enormous they become the hills themselves — SO IT GOES.

Because with her, it always does.

She spent my whole life telling me to make memories. This time, we made one you can wear.