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Show Moon-.85 This is a confession, without benefit of absolution. I wish I could have been a better daughter. They say it's normal for a daughter to hate her mother for a time. What I say is, something's wrong in a world where a daughter has to be ashamed to be like her mother. The men who rule the world and tell us about God leave something out. What they forget is to say: Mothers did not bring evil into the world any more than we did. They forget to say: You're beautiful. You're like the mouth of a river, the spring into a lake. Out of you comes life itself. Remember our long drives through Bavaria? Caleb and Lee wrestled beside me in the back seat. I sat with my purse as a buffer against their pushing feet, my face pressed to the window. I tried to memorize everything I saw. Little lakes hung like brilliant beads in the cleavages of the snowy mountains. Sometimes the lakes were electric, so blue they made me tremble and want to cry out. Sometimes they were black, like polished circles of jet. It all depended, James said, on the sky. He said the lakes were called tarns. Some of these tarns contained treasures sunk by Hitler's men. Sometimes people tried to dive for the treasure. He said the tarns were so deep that people could not find the bottom, so cold, that people had died in the attempt. The years in Germany came to an end, and I hugged my friends goodbye, for I was a normal high school girl now with friends to weep for. I wonder if you had friends to weep for, too. Then, I was too selfish to notice one way or another. The ruins in Frankfurt had been replaced by modern office buildings. Where had the survivors gone to live? James would find us a house in Washington where we'd await the next overseas assignment and I'd finish high |