This one goes out to mom, pictured here holding my sister. She's standing in the kitchen of our old house, the one I never lived in, except inside the womb. But I swear, just looking at the picture, I can remember it. I remember the scent of burnt countertops, russet potatoes, cultured butter, and rusty water. Unwashed dish towels. The soft give of the vinyl tablecloth when a dinner plate was set down on it. It's fitting, in a way, that the few photos I have of Mom are from this time, before I was born. It's like looking at pictures of your best friends or lovers when they were children - a time you can never know, never access, and never touch or smell. But all the same, it feels familiar. And you wish you could go back, know them before they knew you. It's the saddest thing about parents to me - that we can't know them as anything else, not really.
Things are hard for my mother today. It's the anniversary of her mother's death. It's the anniversary of the first time Dad left her. And last week, she filed papers for divorce, after he left again to be with his highschool sweetheart (and after she - good for her! - kicked him out when he tried to come back).