Today is the first Mother’s Day my mother will spend in her new residence, a Little Rock retirement center.

Last month she moved out of the house she had lived in for more than 20 years, the longest period she and my dad had ever lived in one house. It wasn’t her favorite house, and it was in a neighborhood she was becoming more fearful about, but one still accumulates a lot of memories in that time.

I should know. I’ve spent two weekends culling bits and pieces of a mom’s life from cabinets, drawers, closets, desks and more.

Yellowed newspaper clippings from whenever my brother and I did anything the local papers deemed newsworthy (and that bar was pretty low in places). Ribbons from academic contests, track meets and soccer games long forgotten. Envelopes of enlarged school pictures that were never framed. Quilts. Pots and pans that prepared thousands of family meals. Shelves of cookbooks and boxes of recipe cards with worn edges. A wedding dress. The 1936 newspaper carrying a bereaved family’s thank-you after the death of the father my mother scarcely knew, the grandfather I never knew.

Memories expanded even as their physical objects disappeared into trash bags.

Some of the expansion was amplification. Events I remembered as a kid I now saw through a parent’s eyes and recognized a parent’s reaction.

While I shook my head at what my parents had saved as memorabilia from my school years, I realized I had sheaves of artwork, school papers and awards from my daughters stashed away (somewhere).

A Better Homes and Gardens Baby Book for young parents back in the 1950s showed that parental obsession with their child’s growth and development wasn’t invented by Baby Boomers. After pages on what to expect and when from your child — including a black-and-white photo explanation on how to diaper your baby in four easy steps — there were pages for Baby’s First Three Months, Baby’s First Word, Baby’s First Steps and more.

Then there was the flash of recognition at similar behavior a generation earlier: The page for my birth’s vital statistics was filled out in my father’s handwriting. The subsequent pages of my first three months, first word, first step — all blank.

I later found my father’s baby booklet, which had his vital statistics dutifully filled out, complete with signatures of his parents and grandparents. The following pages after baby’s birth — blank.

Then I came across photos of my mom as a teenager and young woman, and was struck by how lovely she was, with sparkling eyes and a disarming smile. It’s a side of my mother that never occurred to me before.

Mom is always your mom, locked into the life she has with you: feeding you, clothing you, nursing you through sickness and always an adult. You never get to see her life before you, the days when she was an independent, sometimes flirtacious, charming young woman — qualities that the responsibilities of parenthood usually push aside and qualities usually not employed on one’s children.

Maybe that’s why she saved those pictures, although I suspect her mother did the saving.

A single apartment room doesn’t have as much space for memories’ objects as an old three-bedroom house. Those memories now will reside largely in the mind, triggered by conversation and thought now more than touch and sight.

Perhaps conversation and thought, laced with love, are the best gifts for Mother’s Day for that reason. They honor a life not contained by four walls and dresser drawers, but through expanding circles of family and friends touched as time flowed, unstoppably, past baby books, school pictures and wedding dresses.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom, for more than paper, ribbons and photos can tell.

Carl Hoover is the Tribune-Herald entertainment editor. His column appears the second Sunday of the month. He can be reached at 757-5749 or choover@wacotrib.com. And be sure to check out his blog at wacotrib.com.