Isn't She Lovely?

The most beautiful woman in my life has always been my mother. Just 20 years older than me, she was always my ideal for how a woman should look.

Auburn tresses, brilliant eyes, ruby lips, long delicate fingers, a tiny waist, and perfect hips -- this is the picture I carry of my mother. Flaming, flamboyant, larger than life. She always left me standing in her shadow as she breezed through life, swallowing up all the air around her. In every room eyes were only on her.

In my old age I've begun to look a bit like her -- but still only marginally. In my youth, I never added up to the package she presented. I have thick ankles; hers are perfectly formed. I've spend hours trying to reduce my hips and butt while nature endowed her with the perfect hour glass figure; I've always been a pear. Her hair, thick and red and curly, glowed in the moonlight, forming the perfect halo of curls; mine has always been limp and straight and plain brown. My bossom as a teen was flat and as an added insult became huge and unmanageable after 40. In her twenties, hers was a perfect 36B and undoubtedly, even now, in her eighties is fashion-figure flat.

My mother is the most beautiful woman I've ever seen in real life. Isn't she lovely?

Mother as a teenager -- nothing ungainly about this girl:



Mother's wedding picture -- taken just at the end of WWII -- the suit was powder blue and must had been a perfect foil for the red hair:


I'd just been born -- you can see my tiny foot just out of camera range but the camera only has eyes for the beauty front and center:

Happy Mother's Day!