This week holds the birthday of my mother, and if she were still alive, she would be very old, indeed. Never one to reveal how many years she actually had lived, Mom responded to more than one query with "A gentleman never asks a lady her age." And I will honor that.
She emigrated to this country as an adolescent with her parents, and, unfortunately, lost her own mother to a fast moving cancer within a year of their arrival. I'm sure December remained a bittersweet month for Mom throughout her long life.
Christmas Gift
A forgotten photo
now reproduced, enlarged, found in a box
saggy with age, dampens your creased cheeks.
"It's my mother," you explain, unwrapped,
as if I didn't know. Her funeral held
in early December on your fourteenth birthday.
Like the scattered Russian
nesting dolls underfoot
how do we fit together?
Grandma
forever young,
you unguarded as a child
absorbed with your present,
me now feeling like your mother
in this stack, somewhere, my own daughter.
Marilyn Aschoff Mellor
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