Her birthday

 

Today is my mom's birthday. She would have turned 99 years old. In this picture, she is the age I am now, and doing a damn sight better job of aging than I am managing. She always was a beauty, with the gentlest of laughs, yet a will of oak, not steel, because steel is cold, and her will was warm, nudging you to do exactly as she wanted you to do, because she had this kindness about her, an aura, that made you want to please her.  Even so, as a teenager, and even as a young woman, I flexed my oppositional muscles as if it were my duty to do so, until at last I came to understand that never in life would she have asked me to do or be anything that did not richly serve me. The blouse I am wearing in this photo was crocheted by her already arthritic fingers. I still have all her crocheted creations. I miss her so.