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from hours of maid work to stay awake but determined to give me a shot of joy. Daddy, who read Bible stories to me at bedtime and combed my hair on Sunday mornings, had been my heart. But Mama, I now realized, had been the person who made our little family possible, sheltering a youngster she could easily have despised.
    â€œI’m your daughter,” I said one day after stopping by Mama’s apartment to drop off bags of groceries. She didn’t say anything, but her eyes told me that she knew why I’d never gotten around to taking that trip to Alabama to search for traces of my unknown family. My only regret is that I never really thanked Mama, in clear, direct words, for all she’d done.
    When she died, I had engraved on her tombstone, “You taught me everything that matters.” One of the things she taught me is that life isn’t some big-screen drama in which families thrash out all their differences in two hours and then blend their voices in a symphony of joy. Sometimes love is just a lunch packed with extra care, a shared dish of ice cream, a jug of homemade lemonade or a mother who fills her daughter’s head with a stream of constant dreams.
    And family? I know what that is, too.
    It’s whomever you’re lucky enough to love for a lifetime.
    Betty DeRamus

Getting to Know Miss Gladys
    I t’s good when you’ve got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
    Toni Morrison
    I recently remarried at age fifty after being divorced for fifteen years. My new husband had been divorced for twenty-five years, so it was not something we entered into blindly.
    I married the first time at age nineteen, and my mother-in-law played a very traditional but special role. “Mother,” as she was called, was a strong matriarch. She was older and more domestic than my mother. She taught me how to cook, clean, take care of my baby, make herbal potions for everything from colic to cramps, to be a practical, functioning wife and mother at such a young age.
    During our courtship, my second husband-to-be took me to his hometown in southern Virginia. He had told me his mother was in a nursing home, but when we arrived, I was emotionally unprepared for what I saw. A very small, frail body in a fetal position, a tiny childlike face with penetrating eyes lying on a pillow with a pink bow in her hair.
    She had not spoken in three years. She had recently celebrated her eighty-ninth birthday, and her room was full of balloons and birthday cards. Above her bed was a loving collage of the many people in her life who wanted to acknowledge her and be remembered in some small way. It was obvious that she was loved.
    We visited her quite regularly; her eyes followed me wherever I went.
    I learned that she was able to communicate her likes, dislikes and even her opinion about things with those deep-set eyes. When my husband-to-be proposed, we went to tell her the news. When we arrived we thought she was napping so we sat, talked and waited for her to awaken. My husband gently stroked her cheeks and hair as you would a sleeping newborn and whispered softly into her ear how much he loved her. Her eyes slowly began to open and look around, and I realized she had not been sleeping but had been playing “possum” to hear what was being said while people thought she was asleep—something she was known to cleverly do.
    I walked over to her bed and stood directly in front of her and said, “Miss Gladys, I am going to marry your baby boy, Charlie.”
    Her eyes widened, and I saw a flash in her stare that only a powerful black mother can give—a look that at once warmed me and warned me.
    My husband saw it, too, and commented, “Did you see that look Mama gave you?”
    I not only saw it, I also felt it; I just wasn’t sure exactly how to interpret it. I think it was a dual look of acceptance: “So you are the one that got him—okay, I like you,” mixed simultaneously with