Mother

Mother's Day is tomorrow. My mother has been dead since the autumn of 1992. We had 31 years in which to walk together in life. She remains close to me in spite of death. So many good things in my life are due to her example and love. I can't tell you that I miss her, because I feel just as close to her today as I did at any time when she was alive.

Here we are in the backyard of my childhood home in Flat Rock, Michigan. It's July, and I'm approaching 6 months. The note scribbled in her handwriting on the back of the original reads: "He looks like Grandma Sperling here". That's got to be her mother (Hazel Lillian McHaney-Sperling, 1893-1965). Her own grandmother Sperling died when she was 8 in 1927, and I've never seen a picture of her, nor was she ever mentioned. Now Hazel was a rather butch old gal, but my grandmother and not my grandfather? Some things a mother knows....