So we go there, where nothing is waiting. Your small hand is not there for me to hold, your shoulder is not there to support my head as I cry. We were the same, I came from you. My waist is thin, yours was once thinner still. I am taller, for I stand on the height you built for me. Our eyes are green, mine a bluer green than yours. Our eyes look out to different doors. Mother, mother, mother mine you have gone there to your blue-eyed mother. Mother, mother, mother mine, I will follow you, my green-eyed mother.

I am young, mother, there is so much for me to do. Mother, mother, mother mine I will meet you, clear-eyed with no fear, for you are there. Your toes tingled; touched from the other side. Mother and father carried you on golden litter, trailed by daisies and ancestors. On this side, we wept and rain blanketed your roof. And, so we go there, where nothing is waiting, but there you are and here I am. Your arms are open until I am yours once more.

Daughter, daughter, daughter mine, I am here. I am waiting for you! We are apart, and will be, for years and years, but I sit on your shoulder, I look through your eyes, I made you, daughter, but first, I was made, and then you took what I gave you and created a being that walks down city streets on her own. The gutter calls, but not for you. You are yours, daughter. I am here, in golden light, in winter rain. Close your eyes, daughter: I am here.

You have the longest, wisest pearl necklace in the world.

There is nothing I would not do for you if I thought it was for your betterment.

Mother, rise! We are under April skies and I need our nighttimes back. It is lonely walking home without you.

From the very first moment we "met" I knew what I was dealing with. "The mostest."

Hello, my friend.

Beautiful bride.

The rain is starting. The world is crying. My mother died this afternoon, and so we go there, where nothing is waiting. The song is getting closer to the world, and you and I sing it together.

(Undressed) like mother, like daughter.

daughter, lou doillon

mother, jane birkin

jane and lou, mother and daughter

This rambling article from Lou Doillon is so wonderful and charming, even with all the flourishes of fame and fortune. For the record, as a child at temple, I used to dream about piling all the fur coats in the coat-room into a heap in the corner on the floor, to nap nestled in the warmth and perfumery.

As a child, I loved dressing up. I didn't know the Jane Birkin of the Seventies, when she was doing Playboy and going out every night. I was raised by a mother who was only doing humanitarian causes. I come from a crazy aristocratic family. There was something of a P.G. Wodehouse madness about it - wearing top hats to have tea. It was Alice in Wonderland and J.M. Barrie put together.

I was raised in a room that was black, with an old four-poster bed and a sink from the Orient Express. It was a big house hidden behind four enormous doors. I was surrounded by curios - a little shoe of Marie Antoinette's that Serge Gainsbourg gave my mother, old pianos, stuffed animals. My crazy uncle talked about chaos theory until 4am. I was the classic daughter of a star. I remember sounds, people screaming, being hidden under my mother's fur coats. In all the pictures you can see my little feet poking out from underneath. It's the sound of fame that I remember. Ever since childhood I have been paranoid about being the daughter of someone famous.The only way to do battle with that is to work my a*** off so I can confront people.

With Lee Cooper I am designing everything from the start. They said, “You don't have to do it, we can do it for you” - but I said no, I want to learn. It's my name written in those trousers, I want to be proud of it. I can't let someone else do it. I can't say I don't want fame. I take great pleasure in being seen. It's a thrill when you're in one of those families where everyone is recognised. I don't want to live the life of a star, but I'm constantly taking the Tube and the bus and being spotted - I guess I enjoy it, though, or I'd be hiding in black cars with tinted windows instead.

English and French style differs in its humour. In England you laugh at yourselves, in France we laugh at others. That's what you find in fashion, too. In France there is a wonderful elegance: on the Metro, in any railway carriage, there is more style than in any other country in the world. French girls know themselves; they don't follow trends. Girls like me who have no boobs have always dressed like boys, wearing open tuxedos with nothing underneath.It's wonderfully classy and elegant but, at the same time, there's a lack of humour.

I'm p***ed off that we have a President who is wearing Prada. I was always glad to know that the President wasn't looking at himself in the mirror in the morning. People are mocking Sarkozy because he is with Carla Bruni. I have no problem with this girl, and it's not because he's with her that suddenly I don't like the bloke. I just find it appalling that everyone supported him when he was making very wrong moves. Now, just because he's married to her, everyone hates him. There are much more interesting reasons for hating him than her. In London I feel more confident. My son and I start the day in Paris dancing to rock'n' roll music - we have top hats, and beads in our hair - but we put on our casual clothes to go out. In London we wouldn't change. When you're famous in France and wearing top hats at 9am, they don't like you. The French prefer you to be subtle. I love going to New York. No one cares there. I go to Starbucks in an enormous hat, dressed up as a boy, with a fake moustache. Everyone says: “What a lovely moustache.”

and the Vedas say, and we all say, too, it would've been your 97th birthday day today

photo inscribed by my grandmother for my grandfather:
"To Leonard darling, with all my love, Hannah"

My grandmother, her only daughter, and her only daughter's only daughter were all born under the first sign of the zodiac. Our terrestrial bodies (1913, 1954, 1979) are pulled by the tides of the same celestial bodies.

This morning, my mother said, "I can't imagine what she would look like. I wish I knew. It has been such a long, long time."

Finest thing.

Our mother taught us the hard lessons of life. When it would have been easier to say yes then to press on through her child's tears, she choose the path thicketed and thorned, for it would lead to a beautiful island where her children could light a fire and make their way in the world, through plenty and drought.

The crickets sang in the grasses. They sang the song of summer's ending, a sad, monotonous song. "Summer is over and gone," they sang. "Over and gone, over and gone. Summer is dying, summer is dying."

The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last forever. Even on the most beautiful days of the whole year-the days when summer is changing into fall-the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change. -Charlotte's Web

The crickets sang of no rumors. Like my mother, the crickets sang of truth. There is a glass wall, thick, clear, soundproof, between myself and my sadness. The bed my mother bought me has been taken away, I lie here in the heat in the bed I bought with my husband. Where does my sadness lie? When the yellow light comes through the trees, will it be waiting for me? I read that the deeper their love for the departed, the harder it is for mourners to leave the cave of denial, and I felt not so terribly wrong for eating, for sleeping, for picking which black dress to wear. Summer will go, it will leave us (I cannot say die, batteries do not die, only people, and for me, only one person) yet it will, once again, return. Beyond the glass wall, I know, unlike summer, my mother will never rise again but here, in the stillness of July, 37 days later, 899 hours later the daughter that I am now, the daughter of a dead mother, waits for her great love, her first love to rise again.

Reparation

Roman Pool, Hearst Castle

Mosaicology asked (thank you!), I answered. I'm normally shabby at these things- this time, fleet feet! Though, I haven't quite played by all the rules, so shabby still, I suppose.

1. I am an only daughter's only daughter.
2. I am black-haired, turning white.
3. I am intent on anonymously distributing a pamphlet.
4. I am outing my anonymous intentions.
5. I am a weasel, and an owl.
6. I am green-eyed, though not the jealous sort.
7. I am in love.

Eulogy for my mother.

The Strawberry Moon reached its peak at 4:16 on Wednesday June 15. On Thursday June 16th, I could not see the moon in the sky. As my mother lay dying in our den, a tree was felled from our neighbor's yard, to make way for a swimming pool. A man cradled by a rope scaled the tree, and cut it limb by limb, as a crew of others in green shirts stood in our yard to guide the falling parts away from harm, away from my mother who lay, one foot here, one foot there, her shallow breaths and pulsing neck monitored by my hungry eyes. A glass door and five men shielded her from the tree, but nothing can shield the masses who love my mother from what has fallen on us.

On Thursday night, I stretched myself on a deck chair and listened to my brother talk to his new friend with the beautiful name. I looked at the tree in our yard that now stands silhouetted by a ghost. It stands still, and will continue to, without the caress of another's leaves against its own. The tree that is gone remains with us in its absence. Its living form is no more, but what remains is the roots, reaching down, like fingers holding tight. Under the shadow of the tree remaining and the shadow of tree that once was, I whispered in my mother’s ear “Be a butterfly, fly like the butterflies we grew as children, from chrysalis to beings of the sky.” I told her to be free to go, so she can land on our shoulders.

My mother died on Friday, June 17th at around 1:02 pm. Our “giver of Nachas” as my brother Michael called her, as he covered her cheeks and nose and forehead in kisses, left the temporal world while my brothers waited together on the deck. Petey laid on the couch beside her bed, and I, I curled on the landing listening to her last breath.

My brothers and I will mourn our mother for the rest of our days. We mourn the loss of the old woman she would be. We mourn all that she will not be here to share with us. I was lucky enough to have the clouds part on April 3rd for my wedding; she had been so sick in the months leading up to it, and yet on that day she glowed with love. I was resolute that our wedding would be big and full, a festival of love, peopled by friends and family, the community that we have built. I wanted her to see the people who would care for us when she was gone. It is not luck that my mother was surrounded with love from all over the country in her last months. She lived to give love, and everyone who knew her felt themselves to be the center of her universe, for she gave of herself completely, and with the utmost honesty.

I stand here, my mother’s first born, the only daughter of an only daughter. The words I say are for her and for my brothers, her boys, my best friends. My mother gave me the greatest gifts I have been given – the gift of her love, her moral guidance through the world, the love of books and animals and family and friends. My mother gave me my brothers and nurtured us three as individuals, as unique beings. What went for one, did not go for all, with one exception: her love. Beyond that, I am her mad, bad bibliophile, Adam her gentle soul and Michael her chef and her warm and loving boy. My mother will never know her our children, as her namesake, my maternal great-grandmother Blanche never knew her. But our children will know our mother, for we would not be Leigh Michelle, Adam Ross and Michael Henry without her. I will tell them to be goers and doers, I will teach them to do unto others, I will teach them that relationships require hard work that pays in piles richer than gold and pearls, diamonds and rubies. We will tell them stories of my mother the boxer, of her ‘fro she named Moishe, her love of flying low, particularly on the back of Petey’s jet ski, of her Sternberging little Paul Sternberg in the third grade, bloodying his nose for a forgotten wrong. We will tell them how she gave freely to those who were good, and sought to understand with compassion and forgiveness those who were not. Our children will know my mother, for she will be a butterfly on all of our shoulders, for the rest of our days.

Only daughter, only daughter: set a glass of cold water on the credenza

Ryan Korban's closet frm Lonny

I've got a job to do today: transmit a place, gone for 17 years now. My grandmother's apartment had a closet of crystal, a hall of mirrors, a faint lingering of cigarettes, and packs of Trident original gum.

How can it be snowing? It was barely summer when she died. Today is an aberration, but my life is guided by aberration; the life expectancy of an American woman is 80.4 years, so by that figure, my mother, and those who love her, were robbed of 23 years (remember the provenance of bereaved: bereafian "to deprive of, take away, seize, rob"). 23 years more years would not ready me to lose my mother, but 23 years more is what we should have had. There would have been weddings, our children, joys that she would have delighted in, sadness that she would have led us through.  My mother didn't do for rightness, but for the believing in the rightness, the knowing of what rightness is. There are storms in the world, hurricanes and earthquakes and devastation, yet we are short on the perfect storm of rightness, a wind that always blows north. I follow my mother's wind, I sniff the air in search of her path to follow.

My mother would have been the best old woman. I want (insufficient and bears no weight under my needs, that small word: want) to know that old woman. I will always be her daughter but I was only just becoming her adult daughter. When there is nothing more to come, no more from who you have lost, the mind becomes a hothouse of new and old. Though my mother lives no longer, our relationship lives to me, and as long as I am here, she will guide me. I will go forward, I will change, I will grow, but mothers can look into that prism of their children and see their future, though my mother is dead. Remember:


Besides, 
in my opinion you aren't dead. 
(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)

The girls lament the loss of summer. I did not know summer was ever here. It was warm while my mother was dying, and the sun was shining, and then rain poured from the sky when she died and R. sent me photos of a rainbow flashed from it's terminus on a dingy block, seemingly shot into the sky from the tumbled down, magic warehouse we were married in.

Now, there are no seasons. There is a circle from today back to April 3rd, the day I was married and I had the luxury of yelling at my mother to shut the door (I was nervous for 15 minutes before the ceremony). Up on the chair she went, during the hora we danced for her, with pure glee on her face, our small speed demon. And then, I mark the days that follow. The day she almost died in the hospital, the day chemotherapy was no longer an option, the last car ride together (in the back of an ambulance, just me and my mother, on her way home to die), the last kiss, the last hug, the last words I can't remember (watching your mother die is so very not like the movies), the last breath. There are no seasons, the cheap thrill of pumpkins or the first snow or blossoms to mark time. There is today, and there is yesterday.

I will make it okay, because she taught me how. But I want more than okay. I want the algorithm that teaches me how to live in the shadows of her beating heart. I want my mother.

Little fish, big fish.

bronze butterfly necklace by Jezebel, $220

It showered yesterday; rain, love, lingerie, swan cream puffs, aunties, cousins, childhood dreamtime, mothers, daughters.

The newest piece in my collection is cast from my grandmother's brooch. As I've told you before, and I'll tell you again, I am an only daughter's only daughter.

Dear Mom,

I am writing this on your computer, and I am thinking of how cute you were by the light of the video chat, falling asleep, the laptop bigger than you, tilting in towards your forehead as you fell asleep. And I would say, gently, "Mom, go to sleep," and your eyes would open and you'd say, "How did you know I was sleeping?" and I'd say, "Your eyes were closed!" and sometimes you'd be snoring lightly too.

Mom, I started reading our emails to each other today. Your email account is open (were you the last person left using AOL? Without you they are doomed!). You have 1890 unread emails. I will look through, to make sure there are none that need to be answered. I started answering your emails in June, and I had to tell friends why you yourself could not answer.

Our emails to each other are funny and silly and full of love. I am so proud that I wrote to you: i appreciate your pearls of wisdom. you have the longest, wisest pearl necklace in the world. My last email from you is on May 15th, but on April 7th you wrote:

To the most beautiful bride,

Wow! What beautiful pictures. You and Kevin look amazing! This was the best wedding I have ever been to. I am soooooo proud of all your efforts and your vision and how you remain true to yourself and who you are.

Hope you are having fun and thinking about you all the time.

Love & xxxxxx's.

Mom

Thank you, my girl, for allowing me to be the person you made, even when you did not understand that person. Thank you, my girl, for being honest, always, even when I wished you were not. You knew all of my secrets, because I trusted you to treat them with care, and because we need to be told when we are doing the wrong thing. Without you, who loves me enough to tell me I am wrong?

On the anniversary of Nana Hannah's death, I posted about her here, and you wrote, "Yes you have it right. I certainly do miss her. 17 years is a long time. She was so beautiful." Mom, now I am a daughter whose mother has gone, and I think of the years that stretch before me, without you here. You told me, before you left, "I'll be with you always, except for the private moments." Mom, stay with me always. 32 years with you was not enough.

I love you, and I miss you are words not enough.

Your first born, your daughter,

Leigh Michelle

Dear Mom,

It has been 2 months since we lost you. Liz got married on Saturday night, and we were there (you rsvp'd yes, and ordered the sirloin), me and Kevin and Petey and Davey. Petey wore his hat, which you wouldn't have been happy with, but it was his fancy hat, which makes it better. When we got home from the wedding, to our house, to our house that you lived in and died in, I had this email waiting for me:

Are you THE Leigh Batnick...
…who was a sweet & lovely 5th grader at Lakeside Elementary in Merrick in 1989-90? I suspect it must be you, as your writing is as deep & graceful & magical now as it was then. I came upon your blog just now, and am so very sorry for your loss.

Of all things, I remember your mom’s signature on your report cards & absence notes. She had happy handwriting!
My deepest condolences to you & your family; my heart goes out to you.

With love,
Christine aka "Ms. Wicks"

Mom, you remember Ms. Wicks! She was my favorite teacher, her, and Dr. Isaacs (he understood me before I did). The thing is, I haven't exchanged a word with her in 21 years and she emailed me precisely at the moment that I was toasting Liz and Liz and I met in her classroom. In my toast, I quoted from the letter Liz wrote you on June 5th, and in that letter she spoke about Ms. Wicks.

Mom, I know you already know this. I haven't written back to Ms. Wicks yet, because I'm waiting to understand; I spend my days waiting to understand. Liz, who knows deep loss from the its eddy, wrote to me:

...Although I know you do not feel connected to your sadness, rest assure, you are at a kind of magical stage of subconscious connection. She is speaking through your heart, mind and pen (or rather, your laptop). Sadness will roll in with the tides of mundane memories, with holidays, with realizations about the lack of phone calls. Unfortunately, it will eventually come. But for now, know that the unexpected thing about loss is a strange super-powered infusion of love that you gain from the person that you lost. It is almost like a shield that they give us for our hearts. And that shield is made up of the energy created by the POWER of your connection to them. Some may call it denial or shock, but really, I think it is the protection given from our beloved, the one who knows that our fragile hearts can only take so much at a time... Lest they break in two. And that is the last thing that they would ever want to happen...

I spoke to Ray-Ray tonight, and she told me that Jane asked you before you died, as best friends can, "How will I know you are with us?" and you answered "You will know. There will be no doubt about it." When Jane opened the library the first morning she went back after you died (you loved little ladies and librarians who loved pink wine), 3 computers were on but the main computer, the host, was off. No one was there, the computers are turned off every night, religiously, and she knew. It was you. The mother-ship was dark, but still, she lit her 3 children.

Mom, you light your 3 children. I think about what I did not ask you; I did not know you were afraid of heights. Petey told me when you went on the ski gondolas out West, you hovered over desert and prairie, canyons and brush, and your hands tightly gripped the sides. I am afraid of heights, too, or of precipices, more specifically, and I couldn't breathe as we ascended the Eiffel Tower, so down quickly we went. I never knew you were afraid of anything, except what could hurt your children. You are fearless to me. You feared not death, you feared not life.

Mom, your heart has stopped, I heard your last breath, but your heart made mine, and now Liz tells me, that you cradle my broken heart. Please, come to me. Be with me in dreams. Michael dreamed of you, dead, but re-animated, and I am so jealous. In his dream, you told the three of us that Petey took good care of you, and when he told me about his dream I said, "You're right, he did" and Michael gasped, for I had said exactly the same thing in his dream. My girl, be with me in a dream. Tell me what I know (but the knowing is hard, and it's not the same as your voice telling me, kissing me, nuzzling your head into my neck - you are short!) you would say if you were here. Tell me that you love me, tell me that I am the daughter, the person, you hoped I would be.

Mom, I fear not the night or a great height. You are with me, you are in me, you are all around me. I love you, my girl, and I love my brothers and we talk to our uncles and I will be better about calling your friends (my friends) and seeing Poppy. You have taught me how to live, and I want to be my mother's daughter. There was no one better than you, my mother.

Tuck me in, and slowly tell each part of my body to rest, to exhale from my tiniest toe, to the tip of my head, like you did when I was small.

I love you, I love you, I love you and this is not good night, for maybe I will see you tonight.
Lulu Belle

For Lisa, because she asked.

We gathered together again, grown tall like the cat tails on the marsh at the end of our block, once over taken by fire, the trucks sounding, smoke billowing when the school bus dropped us home. We have already lost one of our mothers and now we sat on the steps, drinking beers and laughing, with husbands and wives, waiting, as we lose another mother, this time mine.

She is asleep now, on the hospital bed that waited for her as we rode home in the ambulance on Friday, mother and daughter. We looked backwards out of the windows with our green eyes and we couldn't tell, on roads so familiar, where we were, on the roads that led her to visit her children in Washington, in Philadelphia, in Indiana in the days after the monuments fell and her son was too scared to fly home, so home flew to him, and our New York license plates elicited cries of love from here to the farmlands that stretched out before our open eyes.

The children are grown, Elliott Street is for new families, other families and these days, love flies here to say their goodbyes.

"The Dance of the Hours"

fantasia sketch + inclement ostrich necklace, $118

An absolute and defining childhood memory: sitting in a dark movie theatre, watching Fantasia with my father. Brothers not invited, just my dad and his only daughter.

My castle, my books.

Mardi Gras revelers in costume, circa 1937-40, photo by Eudora Welty

Nearly done with The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty, Pulitzer prize winning writer, and accomplished photographer.

“Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture, and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it. These were things a story writer needed to know.” One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty

The big and the small.

Dear Mom,

Last night, on my way home from work, I thought about what we'd talk about if we could (Rise, Mother, rise! We are under April skies and I need our nighttimes back. It is lonely walking home without you). I started writing these letters to you when death crept closer, when we were in the delicate waltz. Now that Death has gone riding, the things I want to talk to you about are small. I got new lipstick on Monday, I think you'd like it. My kitchen floor is sticky - should I use ammonia to clean it? Yes, I know, never mix ammonia with bleach. The girlfriend is just so tired. Let's go get a manicure, Mom.

Today is my birthday, Friday the 13th, just like the day I was born. You were 25 when I was born, you worked as a secretary at McGraw Hill, you were married to my father, you lived on the East Side and I was your first born, Leigh Michelle. Your father, Papa Leonard, died 2 years before I was born, but before he died he liked to have lunch with you at the McGraw Hill commissary, and he teased you gently, his last-born, Blanche Susan, his only daughter, and it made you so mad - you wanted him to take you seriously. I know Papa Leonard, I never met Papa Leonard, one day our children will know you, too. You named me after Papa Leonard, and one day, I will hope I will have the joy, and the sadness, of naming someone Blanche, the third Blanche in our family.

So let's talk about small things, Mom. Tell me the story about Aunt Bernice being annoyed, on April 13, 1979 - she had to take a taxi (or the subway, or the train, I can't remember?) home because she was having lunch with Nana Hannah when you went into labor, and tell me how Uncle Dickie missed his chance to ride shotgun in the Hebrew School carpool because Nana Hannah gave birth to you (she was 40, Papa Leonard was 50!) the week it was her turn to drive and he was so mad. I think he still is mad, the wonderful kind of mad that you can only be at someone you really, really love.

I woke up early this morning and I lay still in bed in the quiet. And then I read my emails and I had an email telling me that I won a contest for a fancy pair of pajamas. Mom, I knew I was going to win, just like I new I was going to win that coffee table, just like I knew, all winterlong, that you were going to die soon after my wedding. I was right. If you are very still, and listen very close, you will know, and I know, Mom, that we love being cozy, that being tucked in bed is our favorite place to be, and I know, Mom, that the silk pajamas I won are really a birthday gift from you.

Thank you, Mom, for giving me life, for giving me a beautiful life. Thank you, Mom, for the big and the small.

Your first-born,
Leigh Michelle

Most nights when I set out to do this, I know what I want to say to you. It is always at night. I am, like Blanche Susan, a sleepy night owl.

The thumb on my left hand is dry and withered. I do not seek to remedy it. I stroke it, I nurture it, for I know where it comes from, and I do not want to hear any other explanation. It is my childhood, representing itself. If I were to tell my mother about my left thumb, she would know it was the thumb that I sucked until I was too old to suck my thumb, my unconscious habit, in bed, lights dim, under the covers, with a book tucked in front of me and a pile of books beside me.

The other night, I was out with my husband and J., the troubadour, who both claim to not remember what it feels like to be a child. Not remember what it feels like to be a child! It seems impossible to me. I think my entire life is a winding pursuit to the secret garden I dreamed of when I was small. I search for the path that leads to a palace blanketed in snow crunching beneath my feet, a gown made by my mother clutched between my mittened hands. I look for the doll makers, the suffragettes, the pioneers, the mute geniuses, an old house in Paris that was covered with vines. I look for the life I found in the books she spoiled me with. She, the non-reader, indulged her daughter at the library, at the bookstore.

The sadness of mourning, you learn to live with. The anger of grief, you learn to live with. The anxiety, the fear, the depression, all of it becomes a new, familiar friend. What I will never learn to live with is missing my mother. My mother is my phantom self, the part of me that is no more. I do not want to close my books, my dreams, myself as my mother's child. I pick at my left thumb, I treasure that old wound, for in it is the late nights, hot under blankets in the cold house, the girl who didn't quite belong, but was loved, and oh, how I was loved. In my scaly left thumb, is my mother, guiding me along.

An Appeal from Whistling Swan, the Doll Maker's Daughter.

A few months ago I wrote the foreword for the book which accompanied Animal Cabaret, an exhibition of the works of Alice Mary Lynch, Paris-based dollmaker. We plan on more collaborations - her work moves me enormously, and I feel so blessed to have one of her dolls living with me soon.


My mother made an army built of stuffing. We were warriors, our armor bursts of jewels where, on you, there would be flesh. Our hearts are in her stitches; tight seams keep our armpits from surrendering to the push of our gossamer insides. Like you, we are complex, but our veins and capillaries are on our outsides. Though our thoughts fire in mounds of gold, they are as real and true as the ones inside your head. We are beautiful, we are knock-kneed, we shine, our eyes some dun, some stars. We are soldiers sent forth from our mother's fingertips, to Tokyo and New York, Bombay and the Barbados. Think of us, for we think of you.

The winter air was crisp and cold but a warm light glowed in the undergrowth in the early hours of the morning. You are in my mother’s land and in the naked copse, bare in the crystalline air, a glint cuts the shadow. There goes The Love Cat, the Dark Princess, Luke and Edward Hare, the Silver Hare, the Hare Prince, a Lost Romantic, a Rat Soldier, The Black Angel, The March Horse. The White Stag flies past last, and you don’t believe your eyes, but it is he, it is we, our mother’s army.

This is the denouement: Were you to disembowel me, my parts would shine in a bowl, yet I am more than the sum of my parts. I am a network and you cannot extricate one part or undo one vein without collapsing my beautiful beak, the efflorescence of my tail, the sway in my walk. Love me as I am, as she made me. Love me, and I will be yours.

"Devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice"

Jeanne Hébuterne + a drawing by Jeanne Hébuterne +
Jeanne Modigliani, 1964, Life Magazine

Green-eyed Jeanne Hébuterne was the vulpine ideal of all Amedeo Modigliani had been questing for. Two days after he died of meningitis, aged 46, she, aged 21 and 8 months pregnant, walked backwards out of a window. They left behind a small daughter, Jeanne Modigliani, aged 2, to be raised by relatives who scoured the family tree of her bohemian, wild-living begetters. The little girl, who knew not from whence she sprang, grew up a painter, like them, and devoted her life to restoring her mother's artist legacy. Her father's legacy as a painter required no such assistance (his "Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne" sold for $15.1 million at auction in 1998.)

Of pedigrees and puppets

Elsa Schiaperelli

Gogo Schiaparelli

Marisa Berenson was the elder daughter of Robert L. Berenson, an American diplomat turned shipping executive, who was of Lithuanian Jewish descent; his family's original surname was Valvrojenski. Her mother was born Countess Maria Luisa Yvonne Radha de Wendt de Kerlor, better known as Gogo Schiaparelli, a socialite of Italian, Swiss, French, and Egyptian ancestry.

Her maternal grandmother was the Italian-born fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, and her maternal grandfather was Count Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlor, a Theosophist and psychic medium. Her younger sister, Berinthia, became the model, actress, and photographer Berry Berenson. She also was a great-grand-niece of Giovanni Schiaparelli, an Italian astronomer who believed he had discovered the supposed canals of Mars, and a great-grand-niece of art expert Bernard Berenson (1865 – 1959) and his sister Senda Berenson (1868 – 1954), an athlete and educator who was one of the first two women elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Oh to think of a time when one could be granddaughter to a couturier and a medium and when Jim Henson's progeny were still totally weird and the clouds didn't always need to be swept away.

For LBG, who wears Vagabond Picnic, and JWC, under Zeus's sky

You asked.

Hannah Daisy Shuldiner Land:
She was mother to four, grandmother to eleven.
She was not as tall as I thought.
She was a smoker, with the softest, most finely wrinkled cheeks.
She was once a model, once a neck-tie designer.
She stubbed her cigarettes out on a small golden Chinese tray, later to be auctioned at Christie's (it did not sell.)
She was a hobbyist painter, and devoted to the races (horses.)
She loved violets, and variations on her blue eyes.
She gave me a bottle of Youth Dew and a sapphire heart from Hong Kong.
She had a closet of crystal and a wall of mirrors and twin beds with mauve velvet upholstered headboards and a chair that still smelt of my grandfather's pipe.
She had a temper and a long mink coat.
She hated her name until she became Nana Hannah.
She had a mother named Blanche and a daughter named Blanche.

Postscript: She died seventeen years ago, today.