This Mother's Day will come and, after my kids give Loren their home-made cards, and after I have some coffee and a half dozen morning cigarettes, I will hike up Bernal Mountain to visit my adoptive mom.

Bernal Mountain isn't much of a mountain, just an undeveloped promontory above my neighborhood. There are a couple of rock outcroppings where I will sit.

From these rocks I spread my mother's ashes three years ago.

I don't have much to say to her. The words have all been spewed out of me during visits to the beach in the dead of night. I'd bring letters asking "Why?" and longer entreaties, all of which I offered up to her memory in a blazing Bic sacrifice, hoping the smoke might catch her attention. When that didn't seem to work, I'd yell at the surf. And go home. And look at the box containing her ashes.

She left no specific instructions, so I put her on a shelf beneath the shrine I used to meditate. Instead of insight meditation I did this: Breathe in; my mother sitting at her dressing table, telling me the stories of her family, chatting, turning, and wiping a smudge from my face with a Kleenex dampened by her spit. Breathe out; why did you lie to me? How could you lie to me? Repeat.

Discovering I had been adopted a couple of weeks after my mother Carmen's death put a big crimp in my grieving cha-cha. Every mournful memory was woven into a curse. I eventually succeeded in not thinking about it for long stretches of time but that didn't make it any better when I did think about it all. Years passed, and I let this reproachful situation eat at me slowly.

Then something clicked. I don't know what, maybe nothing more than the same urge that gets us out of an uncomfortable chair we've been sitting in too long. I chose her birthday, and, after dinner, I took her to the basement to prepare her. She was in an embossed metal box welded shut for an apparent eternity, and I had to use an old-fashioned can opener to cut it open. It was a struggle. I worried about letting fly her ashes to the basement floor, commingling with redwood sawdust and bits of solder droppings. She was resting placidly in an ultra heavy duty plastic bag, tied at the top with a twistie.

I strode up the hill. I was undisturbed as I stood on the rock outcropping watching the City streets radiating out from the foot of Bernal Mountain. I searched the night sky for the owl that lives up there, but she was out, hunting. I talked to Carmen, "Look I'm still fucking mad as hell, but I can't keep this up. Rest here, I like this place, I come here a lot. I hope you're happy." (This last said in earnest.)

I undid the twistie and threw the baggy up, holding the bottom corners. Instead of the even, gentle dispersal I had imagined, my mother's ashes came out in three of four heavy lumps and formed some odd but distinct shapes on the ground a few feet away. I crawled down and spread her around a bit.

Then I left. It rained lightly two days later and washed the hill.

Ron Morgan discovered that he was adopted at the age of 36. He now serves on the Executive Committee of Bastard Nation, and is list manager of the Late Discovery Adoptee Mailing List.