When Love Falls Like Rain

My mother was a child once, not long before she died. And when she died I didn't miss her, and she didn't fall very far to miss anyway. Still here. Still the beaten child she was, the frantic and tortured creature who couldn't ever look at life with a smile without thinking that somewhere in the smile was a razor waiting to cut her. Somewhere she was a child, and she left like a child, a tiny thing, a tortured thing, and a dead thing, a thing rolled in a sack and dropped in the ground and the ground buried over her, the sun beating down, down by the river. That's my mom.

Up in the hills, in the mountains, by the sky, there is snow, and when it goes, it comes down in rivers, a flood, washing away all before it, in time. Everything goes down someday, comes down like a blow like the blows that left scars on my mother.

It's hard to love a girl who grows up to be a girl whose love falls like rain in the gutter with dirt.

Ah, Ma.