A couple of days after Christmas, Kara sent Jill and me a text message that included this old photograph of Mom. Stel told Wilma and me that she was not sure of its date but that she had located it in a box of photographs of her youngest son, Jordan, way back when he was a newborn. For frame of reference, my nephew is a college freshman who is halfway through his first year as a collegian. Stel placed the likely time frame for this photograph as being 2001 or earlier.
I cannot look at this photograph of Mom and not smile. Setting aside for a moment that it appears to have been taken from an angle consistent with someone who had just been knocked to the ground and had looked up to discover Mom standing over him (with her own camera at the ready no less!) it is nothing less than a quick trip back courtesy of Professor Peabody's WABAC Machine. It is a trip I am beyond thrilled to be able to take.
Mom shared two of her children, and a related amount of money, with the University of Colorado, Boulder. Suffice it to say, she damn sure earned the right to wear CU swag. The white cardigan she is wearing in this photograph is one that she likely first obtained (whether she purchased it or Wilma or I gave it to her as a gift) more than a decade earlier. It is one that she still wore at the time she died in 2017. I call that a bargain. I presume Messrs. Daltrey and Townshend would agree.
More than that, I call it a gift. An extraordinary one at that...
...much like the woman in the photograph, who remains deeply missed and forever loved. Thirty-one months and neither time nor memory shall fade how much she is missed and how deeply she is loved.
-AK
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