Mother. I miss you. Seems as if I do more now that time has gone on. Two years since your exit from our world here, December 2008. It's funny how you'll come to my mind. Like last week when I grabbed your old cosmetic case to use it for Grace. When I opened it, I found cotton balls, Q-tips and your old mini-Clinique travel soap container. Vestiges of you.

I think of you sometimes when my daughter, your only grandchild, accomplishes something. Oh, how I know you'd be proud. I cried the day her art was chosen to be on the cover of The American Journal of Pscyhiatry. I cried because you weren't here. I knew you woulda bust a gut over that and your tongue would have not stopped, telling all your friends, your acquaintances and even strangers that you'd meet. You were a pride monster that way.

I think of you sometimes when I'm putting an outfit together. I guess the clotheshorse that you were lives on in the clotheshorse that I am. (Enjoying your enormous black, silk flower broach, btw. It's so you.)

Recently, I was told that our own mortality comes into focus when a parent dies. I lost you in midlife. It all seems so real. Sort of like a passage. Maybe it is because I am experiencing so many significant passages in my life right now, that you come to mind. Another milestone on a list of milestones.

Thank you for the gifts that you gave me that remain with me even though you are gone.

(More posts on Dorothy Ruth Walker Hammett here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.)