If Dad shuffled through the hallway from the kitchen into the entry hall outside the living room, he would see Mom sitting nearly motionless on the end of the couch, usually with one cat or another on her lap, reading or watching TV. At 93, she was still quite beautiful, and, previous to the spring of 2000, remarkably active. She played bridge twice a month, always rising hours early to be sure to be ready for her ride. She had friends and regular activities.

She had spent her 93rd birthday having two root canals in the full set of teeth still firmly in her mouth. The dentist was sure she was his oldest patient, the case almost everywhere she went. She took no medications, and heard perfectly. She used a cane only for balance.

She was also a sports fan—baseball and golf in the spring and summer, college basketball and the Buffalo Bills in the winter. It was because she had set up her ironing board in the living room in the 1950’s to watch the World Series that I ended up warming seats in Yankee stadium throughout the 19 years I lived in New York City. When I came back to Palmyra in 1996, I forced the Yankees on her—she was a lagging Mets fan. We hollered our way through those first years of the new dynasty, she worrying all the time that I got too excited over the games. Dad despised sports, and fled to his own tiny TV in the kitchen when she turned them on. If it was a deliberate ploy, she never said as much, but it was effective.

Over her head glowered pictures of grim family ancestors and cheerier, airbrushed graduation pictures of her children. At one end of the room was her piano, bought on “time” when she was a single girl working and supporting her mother and father. She had long before stopped playing, but liked to hear me play late at night, from her bedroom over the living room.

She was a beautiful woman in her youth, so much so that her mother wanted her to go to Hollywood. But, being an only child, she stayed to take care of her parents. The one thing that broke her heart was that when she graduated from high school, there wasn’t any money for college.  She went to work in the local factory, worked her way up to a secretarial position, and got her revenge by dressing well, living well, driving her own car, and traveling.

In 1936, she and her cousin took a boat trip to England for two weeks. It was “The Lady Eve,” without the card games. They met Members of Parliament but couldn’t go to Paris because of the rumblings of war. It would take her 40 years to get back.

The memories of Mom’s past life shimmered silently in the attic. Some of the clothes were stored  in dusty plastic dress bags and, some, the ones we’d gotten our grubby childish hands on, lay torn and crumpled in cardboard boxes. They were beautifully made, as expensive clothes were in the thirties and forties. Satins and velvets—bias cut and fitted dresses, a bridesmaid’s dress she wore to her very wealthy Michigan cousin’s wedding, a black velvet evening coat trimmed with ermine that my sister wore to her first wedding.

She married my father in 1945. Since he was nine years younger, her mother, by then a widow, insisted they at least wait until Dad was 30. They were a very attractive couple, frozen in their wryly funny engagement announcements. But her wedding gown, bought during the shortage years of the war, was not, as it would have been for many brides of that time and place, the most beautiful dress she had ever worn.