I took this photo of my mother at Hogback Mountain in Vermont in August 1982.  I don't recall anything about the trip, but my family rented a great farmhouse in nearby Marlboro for three or four summers around 1970.  Her expression seems to hold those memories and the painful two years since my father's death, as well as a sadness I always see in her eyes.

When I wrote on the anniversary of her death, I mentioned her father's depression.  (Christopher Payne's book of photographs, Asylum, just shot to mind.  I want it.)  It was severe, and he was hospitalized more than once.  She didn't much talk about her childhood, but she did tell me of a day when her father asked her if she was his daughter, after a hospitalization and electroshock therapy.  How excruciating for a child, to become unfamiliar to a parent.  All I remember is him sitting in silence in a chair in the sun by the window, in an immaculate short-sleeve white dress shirt with his newspaper and cigar.

Mom was much younger than her three siblings.  My sense is that her childhood was a hard-to-reconcile combination of love and neglect.  (Mine too, differently.)  Mom was the first to die; only the oldest, Harriet, survives.  She is 93.  Her and Mom's relationship was confused, as Harriet was 13 years older and had parental responsibilities she never quite shook.  My mother struggled to separate from Harriet, made more difficult by them both being artists.  It's interesting to compare their work; both were abstract painters, heavily influenced by Hofmann, Picasso, and Matisse.  Where Harriet's work is cerebral and linear (she's said to me so many times, It's all about space, Lizzie), my mother's was figurative.  For me, the difference matches the differences between their personalities.

Oh Lord.  I just previewed the post and saw the date.  It's my father's birthday.  He would be 82.

While I'm haunted lately, I'm also detached.  Two anniversaries haven't registered until triggered the day of.  Near misses.  Rather than anticipate the anniversaries, as I did for years, I'm flirting with the anticipatory guilt of missing them.  I have some of my mother's journals.  In one she wrote that guilt is the only man-made emotion.

This charcoal hangs in my living room.  Its clean lines are uncharacteristic of her work (brushier, looser, more exploratory than known), but it's a great drawing.  I see I'm reflected in it, which seems apt.

Untitled (The Fat Lady), Patty Sweibel