Ave Maria, a lengthy Christmas prose, would you read and offer suggestions?

Mom had artistic creativity oozing from every pore.

Christmas, for her, was a time to express it,

a time to be heard and recognized,

validated, if you will, for her existence.

I remember a specific Christmas, the one before she left us.

We lived in Alaska and Dad had trapped some beaver.

The skins were bleached and looked like white ermine.

Mom, an exquisite seamstress, took the pelts

and designed a Russian style hat for herself, then

carefully cut a Peter Pan collar to wear with her sweater,

attaching strings to each end to tie it together in a bow

with soft, furry white balls hanging from each end.

Truly, she was glamorous in them all.

The daughter of a newspaper editor,

she spent months mentally preparing for the theme

of her next Christmas Letter.

Over a hundred she would send out, she was famous for them.

Some in riddle form, some Acrostics of varying kinds,

some were her own lyrics to favorite Christmas carols.

I still have copies of each one and have no doubt

family friends kept them, too.

She was also an artist, a portrait artist.

This particular year, we lived in military quarters

that had a massive mirror over the fireplace.

For a week, I came home from school to find her

meticulously painting the nativity scene in watercolors.

She used her own face for the Virgin Mary

and the Christ Child looked just like

a baby picture of my brother.

I specifically remember the blue robes Mary wore

and the radiant star she painted in the upper left hand corner

with its rays flowing across the mirror to the bottom right.

She was a trained coloratura soprano.

As a young girl from a small Michigan town,

she received a voice scholarship to Eastman School of Music

in big time Rochester, New York.

She could accompany herself on the piano, too,

her long, red painted nails flashing the keys.

She practiced every night for a week for the open house

that Dad, as Base Commander, was required to host.

Ave Maria was her song of choice.

The same song she sang in church when,

in 1945, Dad was home on leave from the war

and was the first time he ever laid eyes on her.

He leaned over to his brother while she was singing

and said, "I'm going to marry that angel."

He cried upstairs in his room every night that week.

God, she was so beautiful

and talented

and emotionally unfulfilled.

She flew away from us

early that next month

to see how high her wings could carry her

unfettered by others' expectations

and the weight of a husband

and three kids.

I washed her mural off the mirror

and remember the paints blending together

as I squeezed my wet sponge,

like tear droplets running down

the Blessed Mother's face.