[Soft*Silver]

My sister was 8 years older than I. She and my brother had the bedrooms upstairs. I use to sneak upstairs and look around her room. She had some round music powder boxes that I loved. It was the artful carve and curve of the designs, the scent and softness of the powder, the tender lilt of the music when the lids were taken off...but mostly it was about my sister's womanliness that I so wanted to bud into myself.

I loved the things ontop of her dressers. But those music boxes were my favorites. And if I ever find them in the antique stores, I will buy them.

My mother had a vanity and atop hers, was a gorgeous doll lamp with a full cloth skirt and a fan in her hand. I had never seen women like her before. I would sit at the vanity and put on my mother's rouge and her really red 50s lipstick and look wonderously at that lady. She had perfect bowed red lips and the most provacatively lined eyes...again, a testimony to womanliness. When my mother would put on make up, which was very rare for she was a true farmer's wife, I would sit on the chair in the room and watch my mother transform into someone I barely knew...someone who had a likeness to that woman of the lamp...and I so wanted to be a part of this wonderous club....