She sat unaware that her 12-year-old self reclined behind her, resting as did she after celebrating yet another year in her astonishingly long life. Is she an echo of that picture or is it an echo of her?

   She was born in a kitchen & has lived countless hours in a string of others. If annual photographs had been taken starting on that day 106 of them would fill the room behind her.

   I write a lot about mom not only due to  her age but because I continue to learn so much from her.

   This picture taught me more about shadows then it did light. One divides her face. Another blankets her legs & runs into the deep background where her cane hooks a chair. A third group cross-hatches the foreground linking her to her girlhood self. 

   She cannot have much longer. Does this trouble her? Once, nearly sixty years ago, she asked how I was feeling. "Depressed," I said.

   "One foot in front of the other," she advised. It seemed a simplistic solution to the crosscurrents lashing my heart. Yet, that advice has served both her & me well.

   She has put "one foot in front of the other" more times than anyone I know. The elegance & grace with which she has done that has kept many shadows at bay – for others whose lives she has illuminated as well as for herself.

-Erie Chapman

photograph by erie