I  LOST THE WHOLE STORY OF MY MOTHER'S LIFE, WHICH CAN ONLY MEAN SHE DIDN'T WANT ME TO TELL IT.  SEE YOU TOMORROW!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   When my mother was a girl, she used to paddle a canoe across the lac=ake to visit her friends, She lived on the Portage Lake outside of Akron, and the water was her highway.

    Sometimes a storm would come up and the black clouds would roll across the lake, the angry water swaying her bark. Then she would lean low in the canoe and paddle more strongly because she didn't know how to swim.

     Mother was in enough deep water anyway. As a child, her appearance went against her, A tall girl, she was expected to be as mature as her appearancd, and her dark coloring frightened her mother's people. "Schwartze Augen," her grandmother would say, gesturing against the evil eye/My mother's father was an alcoholic, a man's man, but a woman;s nightmare. The family lived a nomadic life, moving all arond the lakes wherever "Pop could pick up a job for a while. His older brother had died of a burst appendix when he was fourteen. His younger brother was as alcoholic by the time he hit high school. Her mother was bitter.

My Mother's eighth grade class photograph says it all. Mom, her black hair newly cut inyo a flapper bob, stands curiously apart from the rest of the students--beside them, but tilting her head awaw as if she is looking at the wotld from a different angle.

School was hher sancturay, She graduated as valedictorian of her hgh school and college ck=lasses. Then she taught for a couple of years and married my father, who did not drink,  required at the time, she  quit working when she became pregnant.

Mother didn't like sweet talk. I remember taking her to visit