Peppers

I was asked to write something about my mother.

Considering the critical role mothers play in Shadows and Ghosts—Edna, Judith, one Jewish, the other Gentile, it’s odd that I haven’t done it before. But these are my thoughts, random, strung a bit haphazardly….

In many ways she was like both Edna and Judith; in others, she was like neither.

A tiny woman, fragile, loose-limbed, and notoriously accident-prone, she could find the single dip in a sidewalk over which a thousand people had stepped without falling. By the end of her life, I’d lost count of all the bones she’d broken, the number of emergency rooms we’d visited.

She had a sharp mind and wicked wit, a striking contradiction to the soft delicacy of her beauty—pink skin, high cheekbones, finely sculpted nose, copper-hued hair, and wide, intense, dark eyes. Despite her constitution, she was steel-willed, determined, tenacious, and thoroughly unconventional…

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