Frances Fawn

My mother told me recently that she had been like a mother to her own mother. I can so well imagine the 11-year-old girl she was in 1946 reassuring her mama. I now know where she got her great wisdom; it was acquired long ago. So almost from the start Frances Wister was Frances Wister's motherly daughter.

I never knew my grandmother Frances and the stories that my mother and others told me were filled with great mystery. I have heard awes over her beauty and oohs over her frailty. The words I have drawn together are: Gram, not a mean bone, gentle, fragile, generous, sick, bright, soft, sick again and kind. There are probably more adjectives I could recall, but they are all in the close vicinity of a fluffy dandelion that a distant sneeze could bare. She died when I was born and she has accompanied my journey as a kind ethereal creature.

For the longest time I could not find an image of her that could be mine, I could not make up a bodily representation of her being. The only pictures of her as a grandmother were blurry polaroids. But the other day visiting my parents, I found a photograph of my mother caressing a fawn. An orphaned fawn she had mothered and tamed when she was only eleven years old. It was a sudden revelation: "That's it! I found my grandmother's face!"

I see you now Frances Fawn…