soul. Her husband’s ship was diverted to the Pacific when the war ended in Europe. He didn’t even get leave between campaigns.”

        Of course, I didn’t realize it at the time, but my mother, an attractive young woman in her early thirties, was facing the tricky task of escorting three pretty young girls across a continent by bus with very uncertain travel schedules. My mother was just mom to me. Like all kids, I took her love and care for granted.  I was puzzled when some of the guys on the bus were giving her the eye.   She was slim and her short brown curls framed a round face with high cheekbones and a sprinkling of freckles across her nose. Her wide set hazel eyes had thick lashes. She had been a young bride and of course, was still very young and pretty.

        We four females traveling together all had different agendas. The two seventeen year olds wanted to practice their seduction techniques, I wanted every little hand tooled leather purse I saw in the gift shops, and mom just wanted to deliver her niece back to her sister still a virgin!    

        In the El Paso terminal, sitting across from us, a Mexican woman with three small children spread a feast out on her lap. Tortillas, cheese, chorizo, fruit… kids stood around her like little birds with their mouths open as she fed them tiny bites. 

        It grew dark and the sounds of bus pulling in and people talking became a background for our uneasy sleep. We wadded up our sweaters for makeshift pillows and stretched out across hardwood no seats.

        I woke up sometime during the night to the sound of a child crying. The Mexican mother was scolding one of her children for dropping a tortilla on the dirty floor. Mom’s eyes met mine and we both laughed. “It’s a good thing Grandma Gunto isn’t here,”she joked.

        My Grandma scolded every grandchild in our family when a crust of bread, accidentally on purpose, landed on the floor. “No…no. It’s a sin to drop the bread!”

        My thoughts were of the only Grandma I had ever known.  She had been crippled as long as I could remember. She suffered a back injury during the difficult delivery of her last child.  Looking back on it now, I can easily imagine the young woman she once was.  As a child I had seen snapshots of her. She was a pretty young woman with high cheekbones and dark hair piled on top of her head.

        In one sepia photo, she was sitting in a meadow holding an umbrella to shade her from the summer sun. Her head was tilted back and she was laughing.  I think it was taken right after she and Grandpa arrived in America from their native Austria. Their dreams were high. They were going to work and save money to buy more land to add to the family farm in the old country.   There were no children in the picture with her. Her first baby, a little girl named Helen, was left behind in Europe in the safekeeping of her mother-in-law despite my grandma’s pleas to bring the baby with them.

        Just like any little kid, I used to insist that the young woman in the photograph couldn’t possibly be my grandma. That wasn’t how she looked. I couldn’t seem to grasp the passage of time between the old photo and years later when I knew her.