It's Mothers Day again. It's different now that my mother is no longer alive, and now there's things I've learned about her that I didn't know before. It's like a conversation that I never had the chance to have.
My mother had many handbags and in each of her handbags she kept a linen or cotton handkerchief - a proper lady! My older sister kept all the handkerchiefs she found when she was clearing out Mom's closet - there were so many. She washed and ironed them and sent them to me because I had told her I'd find something to do with them. They'd been sitting in a plastic bag near my computer and next to the handkerchief pile I had an envelope filled with old letters; most of them are the correspondence between our mother and father when Dad was away in Europe for three months on assignment for his corporate job and Mom was home with a six-month baby (me) and my sister who was about to turn five years old in 1955. I scanned some of the letters, reversed the image, and using a special transfer paper managed to get the letters printed onto some of the handkerchiefs. I used another one to make a pocket of sorts with grommets and ribbon to close the "book." Inside are three letters right at the time of my sister's fifth birthday. The green silk butterfly embroidered on the "cover" is a scrap from a scarf that I remember my mother wearing in the days when women would fold a square scarf down to a triangle and wear it to protect their hairdo from being mussed in the breeze.
