I met my mother for the first time when I was twenty-eight years old, in a faded photograph I found in a small Tiffany-blue box at the back of her closet.
The box held one bottle cap, worn with the constant press of a fingertip. One faded red ribbon, frayed at both ends. One ring, with a tiny diamond fleck on the centre of a pebbled gold band. And, of course, the photograph – four of them, in fact. Each was sepia toned, in the way of old photos, and crinkled around the edges, white border faded to yellow. Each was of the same farm, some years in the past.
Before I explain the photographs, I think I should explain my mother. Before I ever met her, I knew her – as the beautiful woman in the window. Myself with my face pressed to cold glass, one hand stretched out against the dark of some snow-sparkled night. My mother, her face half-turned towards me, one hand carelessly thrown back in a nonchalant wave. She is wearing a gown, maybe black, maybe navy, with pearls or diamonds around her neck. She has a stole, or a coat, wrapped tight against the chill but left loose around her shoulders, to bare her naked skin. That is how I always saw her – leaving, or sometimes, if I snuck out of bed at just the right hour of pre-dawn morning, returning. The woman in the window. I would hear her laughing downstairs, entertaining guests or teasing reporters. Occasionally, if I was very lucky, she would stagger upstairs, giggling, and slip into my room. I always pretended to sleep. Sleeping, I was something precious, something alien. Awake I was just another obligation, another commitment she didn’t quite have time for. Pencilled in at four o’clock. She would sit on the edge of my bed and leave her hand, a dead weight, on the small of my back. Staring. Just staring, for a minute, two. Then she was gone again, downstairs to the world I wasn’t a part of.
The day I found the photographs, I hadn’t spoken to my mother in over a year. The occasional email was all that connected us. When she called me from the hospital and asked me to bring her some things, it took me two full minutes to realise who was calling. I hadn’t known she was sick. She called her doorman and told him to buzz me in, and I walked into her apartment like I was entering a shrine. Followed her instructions and found the bedroom, found the closet, found the box. She asked me not to open it, and then she laughed and said – of course, now you almost have to. I swore I wouldn’t.
But, of course, I did.
The first photograph shows horses – five of them in a row, each in the same white and brown colour palettes, each with varying degrees of colour and shade. They look orderly and yet somehow wild, like there is a spirit in them that can’t be controlled. The trees behind them are barren and tall, slim naked things that whisper of a long winter nearly over. The grass is yellow and batted down, and beyond the dead trees a few lonely spruces grow, green dark against the white woods. There’s the edge of an old worn fence just to the left, hinting at more that we can’t see. The sky is blue – bluer than it seems like it should be in a photo so leeched of colour, blue with puffy white clouds.
The second photograph is clearly the same farm. We see the second and third horse, in a pen. A girl stands on the fence, balanced precariously. I am amazed it can stand her weight, and can almost hear her father yelling at her to get down. She’s wearing an old cotton shirt, brown pants tucked into big black mucking boots. Her brown hair falls into her face, wild and wiping out of its conservative French braid. She’s stretching out a hand to feed one of the horses, and everything in her posture screams that she’s ready to fall, not afraid of it, of the mud below her, of the pain that might follow. She’s smiling – grinning, even, and she has my mother’s eyes.
In the third, it is summertime, and the same forest is in riotous colour. The angle of the picture is different. My mother is at the head of the line of horses, and there is something dejected in her posture. Her shoulders are slumped, her arms hang limply by her sides. She wears a sweet dress, white lace at her neck. She herds the horses beautifully, surrounded by clear skies, not a cloud in sight. She is looking at the photographer, and in her eyes is everything her posture hides. Her defiance, her frustration, her energy barely contained. A life is visible in those eyes, a life I never knew.
In the final photograph, my mother and a woman I assume is my grandmother are making jam. They are too perfect a picture – floral print dresses, hair perfectly tied back, bare feet on the clean tiles. There are ingredients laid out around them, and they are mashing the fruit in long cauldrons. Despite the heat I can see in the sweat dripping down the older woman’s neck, my mother looks calm. But in her left hand, clasped behind her back, invisible to her mother but perfectly captured in the photograph, she holds a feather. It is white, stark against her dark blue skirt, half-crushed by the weight of her fingers.
I never knew about the farm. Never heard my mother discuss her life before the movies. I find myself drawn back to the second picture, to the way my mother laughs as her hands stretches out, the fearlessness in her posture. I met my mother the day I held that photograph for the first time, and I never wanted to let it go.
Image courtesy of Hayley Mechelle Bouchard. Her work can be found at Little Cat Photography, and on Our Contributors page.