I like my gold picture frames and lace doilies: plastic
my valentines: victorian
and my butterflies: shimmering blue.

I can hear the giggle, can’t you?  I can feel the wind biting her nose like her kitten, playing in the haymow.  I can see how good, how really, really good this moment was.

This is who she will always be to me.

Mom was a big believer in Dell Hororscope Magazine, which she purchased religiously (along with a 3 Muskateers bar) from the newsstand at Sol’s Pharmacy where it was possible to see “gentleman’s magazines,” and other lurid sundries which she did NOT want to answer questions about.  She would study these slim newsprint volumes for clues to the demise of Richard Nixon, the possibility of Economic Collapse, and ironically, news of good fortune for people she liked.  She kept them stacked around her corner of the couch long after their expiration date had passed, perhaps hoping one day to shake a particularly prescient headline in someone’s face, “You SEE?   I knew it!”

In these post internet days, it seems beyond belief to describe the mysteriosity surrounding matters astrological – the casting of charts using methods as ancient as, well, yes, the ancients, interpreting nuances of scribbled rune-like glyphs without Google to clear it all up for you, took, you know, effort.  In retrospect, I think nothing would have pleased her more than for one of her children to become an astrologer, although it would have been a thankless job, arguing with Mom, because she would tell you she didn’t need any formal training to know what was written in the stars.

It goes so deep – what I wish I had done for her, how much love was in me, searching for a way to show itself, instead of the annoyed 45 year old adolescent who turned up, again and again, to take her here or there on what I couldn’t permit myself to see were her inevitably numbered days.

So deep, in fact, that there is no cure for it but time and lacy wings of butterfly compassion.  I hope, Barbara Anne Downtain, that this photo will suffice to show you what I had in mind.

This purse was empty for many years (despite my mother’s assertion when she gave it to me that it was full of wishes), until I started to wear it, and look what flew out.  Go figure.

The (glass) pearls are hers.  The word is who she was but not (never) all that she was.  The hand is how she tried to blossom (in this world).  The butterfly is what she left (behind).

Magnetic butterflies are, by far, one of the handiest inventions ever.  Most butterflies are meant to drift and dance, but get these near a little bit of steel and they press like a rock to a hard place.  The juicy candy colorations of their thin plastic wings are what people would dream up, if we were in charge of creating butterflies.

Fortunately, we are not.

Maybe it isn’t as free as you think:  look what it takes to keep a butterfly in one place.

Is it by choice, or by chance that we find ourselves where we are, thinking we have flown here all by ourselves, only to realize that what we thought was holding us down has actually set us free?

She was 12 that year, and already planning how she would look, disembarking an airplane, greeting her dashing companion with smoldering wit and careless gaiety, her scarf fluttering in the breeze like trails of laughter and wings.

Is Cupid jealous of Butterfly?  In a cage match, who wins – Love or Psyche?

Oh, I don’t know, I just make this sh*t up.