I am looking quite a lot like Thomas Jefferson these days...

I am looking quite a lot like Thomas Jefferson these days. My hair is a long knot behind my back. There is a red blemish on my left cheek. It looks distinguished there so I leave it. I rearrange the photos of my mother atop my grandmother's old piano, the photos of her as a child, a teenager. Here she stands between her two brothers, her hair red and huge about her. Here she is dressed as a child in a catholic school uniform, my mother, she wears a tie. At home she is wearing eyeglasses, thick black pointed rims. I've heard her recall them so many times. In the photography rooms she can see without them, she can smile half-way. Then beside and in front of her, I've placed a new favorite. I call her the nun. She is a nun. I never knew this woman, this nun of my family. I thank her, I love her for that. She was not a cheerful woman, said my mother. But she is such a wonderful photo, sitting on the right in a white and wooden chair, the most joyfully spectacled woman beside her. Another woman I do not know sits beside her. She is holding a baby in her lap. She is wearing a pink or a faded red dress and sitting with this nun on someone's lawn. A tree fills the whole frame behind her. She is so lovely in her pink, with her baby and her nun. And I don't give a damn who she is.