Everywhere there are women like my mother, who held families together under extraordinary circumstances.
As a child I used to dig amongst the dusty canning bottles and empty vases on the shelves in the basement behind the desks that sat tucked up against the furnace. The prize for the hunt was the scrapbook that my mother had kept as a girl. No pictures of herself or her family. Instead, the scrapbooks were filled with early pictures frommagazine of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. Their dresses, their curly hair, their headbands and bows and dogs.
In fact, it took until I was an adult to realize that I was the child of immigrants. Living in Buffalo, it was nothing to cross the border to Canada, it didn't really feel like a foreign country. Every year my mother would say,"Take my picture, I'm going to get my papers!" She remained a Canadian until she realized she would have to pay a terrible amount of taxes should my father pre-decease her, a foreigner.
Then, with a start I realized that the elegant woman, her hair swept up in an impossibly high style, wearing a shiny black maxi coat, belted, shimmering, this was my mother. I was stunned. She had brought me a gift; a small doll made of brown thread that made you think of coconuts, in a tiered Seminole dress, with a stiff black bonnet and a double string of beads at the neck.
Over and over on television, as cameras followed the funeral procession through the streets to Buckingham Palace and on to Windsor Castle, the commentators talked about Queen Elizabeth's devotion to her duty.
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