AT HOME IN THE WORLD

Mother’s Day may also be Mothers Day.

My mother calls me every morning from Santa Monica, sounding like a lark, ever since the pandemic. A professor into her 80s, she has a subversive streak and went places all over the world, once to a civil war with a United Nations peacekeeping team. She sees her three daughters as a bit “unadventurous.”

No, Mom, I don’t want to sleep in a yurt in a Kazakhstan forest.

She’s descended from a Puritan woman famed for bravery, no lie. Her flame burns bright, and I love her dearly.

When I was very young, my mother was studying for her PH.D. at Columbia. My father was a medical resident. Our little family lived in Harlem. I shared a crib and babysitter with Kelly.

Her mother Patricia, born an Irish Catholic girl in Brooklyn, was a match for my mother’s spirit. Ahead of her time, her husband Luther was Black. That was rare in the early ’60s.

Red-haired Pat treated me like family. I could ask her anything about leaving my marriage or seeking a job. She gave me a gift of a Waterford crystal Christmas flute, signed with love and kisses.

An education leader, Pat rose to become superintendent of the Manhattan high schools. I went to her memorial service up in New York in mid-march. Guests wore green for St. Patrick’s Day. “You could feel her energy shake the floor,” a teacher said.

Kelly, a lawyer, greeted me as her “crib mate.” Can’t get closer, right? We last met at former President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. She slept over.

When I worked at The Baltimore Sun, I interviewed a civic leader at her warm home, full of pictures of her late husband and three daughters. Her Southern Virginia girlhood was storybook.

So was the way Sally founded a summer camp for city kids who needed reading enrichment. I fell for Sally and left three hours later. She was the friend who later answered my father’s call to take me to Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Sally is gone. Now so is Anne Hopkins of Baltimore, who wrote a shipping newsletter. Elegant and kind, Anne and her husband Sam reached out to discuss his Quaker great-great grandmother. The portrait graced their living room. (Sam read a piece of mine in the paper.)

Easter at their table was worth living for. Anne gave a garden party for three granddaughters before the pandemic. That was the last time I saw her.

“Thanks for the hope you brought out in your cherry blossom column,” she wrote in a card. “Will be in touch to plan an overdue reunion with you.”

Nancy and my mother are close friends from Madison West High School days. We sisters spent summers in Wisconsin with our grandparents, while our parents traveled.

Nancy lives in a spacious house up the hill. The screen door stayed open. I was always going in for guitar lessons, needlepoint stitching or lunch.

A future Olympian, her daughter Beth and I rode

Mother’s Day may also be Mothers Day.

bikes to play tennis by the Village pool.

The sweet August day when we all hopped in Nancy’s station wagon to go to the State Fair was the grand finale. Nancy took charge of my childhood summers. You don’t forget things like that. I still know the house telephone number by heart.

Bunny, daughter of a Connecticut judge and a Vassar alumna, was in Spanish class with Jacqueline Bouvier (later Kennedy). She seemed out of place in Los Angeles, but her bright smile drew people in. She and I struck up a lunch friendship at the Brentwood Country Mart that lasted years — over many birthdays. She never missed mine.

Susan Bell inscribed her memoir to me on my 30th birthday, “with great hopes.” Author of “Between Worlds,” she loved her life as a Czech Jewish girl in the 1930s, near “sun-drenched pines ... (and) the scent of blueberries.”

Susan and her mother escaped to England from the Nazis. Her father perished in the Holocaust. In California, she entered Stanford at 36 and became a historian.

A life lesson: “Home is not so much a physical place,” Bell wrote, “but a concept of the mind.”

These women made me feel at home in the world.