My mother

My Mom

She has a colorful face. Peach skin, brown eyes, purple circles, rosy cheeks, pink lips, clear glasses with no rim. There’s a scar on her neck that nice people eventually forget to stare at. Her brown hair used to be thick and straight but now it is thinner, permed and parted and clipped back in the same way every day.
She walks at a leisurely pace but with clear direction and purpose always wearing her blue jeans up to her belly button and sporting two pairs of socks during the winter along with a pair of very heavy boots. Once summer comes, she’ll wear her ‘lawn mowing sneakers’ that are covered in grass stains and any sense of a structured shoe or sole is long gone. When she walks barefoot, which is not often, she has very flat feet and long toes.
At family reunions, you can always tell who is a blood relative and who is an
in-law because the in-laws do not share the distinctive nose that my mom’s family all inherited and even my mom after living in Massachusetts for more than 10 years, starts to slip back into a Pennsylvanian accent.
One finger is permanently bent from a disagreement with a car door but remains beautiful because of the diamond wedding ring that sits below her knuckle. Her teeth are kind of crowded because when she was little, they pushed and shoved until a couple of the best ones made it to the front of the other teeth.
With black ink bic pens in her pockets, flax seed bread in hand and a rolling backpack in tow, she’s pretty in a kind of ‘she’s MY mom not yours’ kind of way.