Prose poem ... A Family Snapshot

My mother’s soft smile captivates me every day when I descend my stairs. The focus is crisp, but the clarity of the grays and whites has worn with the years. She is younger than me now, when the lens of that photographer captured her image, her engagement photo, her last moments of possibility. Is there a hint of walk-the-plank dread in the slight shifting of her eyes? Is her tightly wound hair disguising the compulsion to run that was thwarted by a failed drivers examination? Is that a light crinkle of worry across her forehead, the precursor of a deep crack that will develop, printing years of worry and sadness and disappointment right on her face? But that will be another image, not this one. In this one, her skin is flawless, smooth. Her mouth turns up sweetly, helpless to not against the tide of hope I believe I see in her eyes. In this photo, she tilts her head with all the beauty of youth and the promise of love.