“I love the smell of Lysol in the morning.” This Mother’s Day as I thumbed old pictures of my mother’s life, that’s what I heard her say so lyrically in my loving imagination when I came to this picture of her and my father that I dubbed “Life in the Construction Zone.” All her life my mother waged a constant war against dirt. To me, she was kissin’ cousin to a confident Robert Duvall in “Apocalypse Now,” explaining “I love the smell of Napalm in the morning ... smells like victory.”

My parents bought a fixer-upper in the mid-1940s. I can remember a time when you could see the attic ceiling from the first floor. My handyman father almost single-handedly did all the work. For several years we lived in dirty, dusty chaos. Mother by nature was obsessively neat and born to the broom. This was homemaker hell for her. I can remember waking from a dead sweaty sleep one roasting August night to her screaming at Dad – both stripped to their underwear in the sweltering heat – “I can’t live like this.”

So this picture is a perfect microcosm of a good bit of her, their married life. Dad, not only keeping his throat moist with a beer but uncouthly swigging it from a bottle, is plastering in the living room. You see a sprayer, a dead soldier bag of plaster, a miter box. You see the consequent lethal layer of dust on the radio cabinet and the floor ashtray. Dad’s in uniform -- pants, I well remember, with every color paint and stain on them that literally stood by themselves in a cellar work closet.

And you see mother poised for battle. Look at her: youthful radiant face, perfectly coiffed hair, clean and neat house dress, and, by god, stockings and white shoes – yes, white shoes! We’re talking “Mrs. Clean” here. Armed with a broom, a tool seemingly totally inadequate to her antiseptic mission. In front of a mantel piece incongruously housing a Spackle bag (his) and dainty knickknacks (hers) jockeying for possession.

You might easily truly extrapolate from seeing my mother’s prim and proper stance here that she inevitably raised me, her only child, as a momma’s boy, with hair that was never mussed (“Bryl Crème, a little dab’ll do ya”), teeth that always sparkled, underwear always fresh, and a bedroom always clean. I was the only boy on my college dorm floor who made his bed every day. And the books on my desk were arranged in alphabetical order. Habits I still possess.

On her deathbed in my house, mom lay catatonic, eyes wide open in unmoving penetrating stare, for two days. When I bent over to fluff her pillow on the third day, she rose like a shot, grasping me around the neck, kissing my cheek, and, I imagined, whispering combatively in my ear that the windows in the bedroom were dirty.

And then she fell back and reluctantly died.