What My Mother Gave Me Read Free

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    In tenth grade I went away to boarding school; my parents took care of Babe. It wasn’t so much work, after all, if you weren’t horse-crazy. She was never shut inside her stall, she wandered in and out at will, so there wasn’t much cleaning to do, only the daily feedings. Whenever I came home I took charge again, going out to the barn to feed and brush and ride her, arranging for whatever she needed. When I called home I always asked about her. “Babe is fine,” my mother always said, and gave me the news: she’d grown a thick winter coat, or she’d just been shod. In the winter she took to lying peacefully in the pasture, curling up like a dog in front of the barn, where the warmth was reflected off the walls.
    After that I never lived at home again. I went on to college, then to other things. Who comes back to live at home once you’ve left?
    I always asked about her, but over the years I stopped riding her when I came home. She was too shaggy, the saddle was too dry, my interests were elsewhere. But still I never wanted to sell my horse, and my parents never asked me to. She had been my heart’s desire. She would always be at the center of that romantic passage in my life, when she was my partner in the wild, dangerous, and beautiful ride across adolescence.
    My horse stayed on, growing old and stiff, ambling quietly about our small pasture, dozing in the sun. She died at the age of thirty-one, which is ninety-three in horse years. It was my mother who found her, one day in early March, stretched out in the muddy field.

Th e Missing Photograph
    CAROLINE LEAVITT
    When I was growing up in Boston in the 1960s, my life was awash in flashbulbs. My older sister, Ruth, and I could be romping wildly around the living room, dancing to the soundtrack of West Side Story, and before you could say Leonard Bernstein, my mother would have snapped a dozen shots of us with her Brownie camera. We blinked at the sudden shock of light, but we always willingly posed, our hands behind our heads, our toes artfully pointed. We were little hams. “Wait! Wait! Take one more!” we begged, and she did.
    Th ere were pictures of us festooned all over our house. On the walls and in photo albums, stuffed in boxes and on top of everyone’s dresser. My mother was our own personal Stieglitz, documenting our lives so precisely that she carefully labeled every photo, both by year and by event. We took pictures, too, of our cat, Elvis, and of each other, but it never dawned on me until I was twelve that there were no photos of my mother anywhere in the house, not even of her as a child. It made sense to us that there wouldn’t be photos of her and our father, since he was seldom home, and when he was, he was silent and sulky or arguing with all of us. Th eir wedding photos were stuck in a white plastic album, and we had the same relationship to them as we did with our father: we didn’t want to get too close to them. Our mother didn’t like posing along with us, her two girls, and we couldn’t understand it. She was beautiful and she could never pass a mirror without looking into it, fluffing her hair or fixing her collar, but she still didn’t want her image captured. “I take terrible pictures,” she insisted. “I’m too old to be photographed.”
    â€œBut what about when you were our age?” I asked. “You probably took great pictures then! Where are the pictures of you as a little girl?”
    My mother came from a family of eight siblings and two Russian immigrant parents who both escaped the czar, a life that seemed so far away from Waltham, so exotic, that we were dying to see the proof of it, but even our aunts and uncles didn’t have photos. “No one really took photographs,” my mother told me. “Your father doesn’t have any of him as a kid, either. It was just different. Not many people took pictures back then and we