Mom, around 30

I’ve been thinking about Loretta, gone 8 years now. I miss her.
I pulled out an old photo album with pictures from  thirty, forty, fifty (!) years ago.
Mom standing with my brothers, both 6′ 5″. Mom on top of a beautiful Arabian on my brother’s farm in ….1978? 9? Mom and my skinny dad on a Lake Michigan beach in Chicago in 1947, shortly after they married. Mom and her three sisters stuffed together on a couch, sometime in the late seventies. One of my favorites; Mom dressed up like Charlie Chaplin for Halloween when she was a nurse at a nursing facility. My partner said, “wow, she looks like she had some playfulness in her”, and I thought, there’s so many things you don’t or can’t or won’t see in a person because you’re: too close/angry/resentful/sad/don’t want to see.

I just deleted a bunch of things that really, don’t need saying.
What I really want to say is, thanks Mom.
You’re exactly the mother I needed, to help me become the mother/lover/woman I am today.

I love you.