My Mama's Birthday

August, 1954

My mother would have been eighty-two today.  She would be right now telling me to go to bed instead of blogging about her, so I'm just going to post a couple of my favorite photos of her.  I miss her so much. 

This was taken at the Caribe Hilton in San Juan, when my grandparents came to meet my six month old self.  Check out Mami and Abuela Lola being all 1954 glamorous in the mirror.  She turned twenty-four that month.

---

Mami and me, around the same time. 

---

And here she is in the summer of 1946, when she turned sixteen. 

---

And here she is on our mountaintop. She loved the natural world and needed to be immersed in it at regular intervals.  Its beauty restored her, as it does me.  She showed me the natural world through her eyes, pointed our color and shape and the behaviors of animals and plants.  She was also someone who needed solitude, as I do.  In this photo she was pregnant with my youngest brother, Alejandro.  It was the summer of 1965 and she was thirty-five years old.

---

At her desk in Chicago, when she was in graduate school.  It was a hard time for all of us, and I see her fatigue in this photo, but she also looks relaxed.  I think it's around 1969. I was fifteen and she was thirty-nine.

OK, Mami. I hear you.  I'll go to bed and post more photos when I wake up, deeper into your birthday.  Signing off at 5:39 A.M.

---