Freewrite 1.6.2

My mother used to have…

          this dress. This black lace dress. I remember she had it made for her when we lived in a country where the clothes didn’t fit and where she didn’t fit the cultural standards of beauty. But my mother was beautiful when she was younger. Is sometimes still beautiful now, if you catch her in the right mood, or the right light, or at the right angle. I digress.

The dress had capped sleeves and a high neck that came up as a collar of lace, leaving a keyhole below her throat, over her breast bone. It was fitted through the bodice, around her curves, and the skirt didn’t flare, but floated gracefully to the floor. It was her dress for the military ball that year, the first one she had ever attended, although my father had already served nearly four years by that time. I suppose that an evening of finery and dancing seems foreign to a young mother with two small children.

I still have a photograph of the two of them at the ball, in front of a massive Christmas tree. My father looking impressive in his crisp Class A’s, and my mother beaming on his arm in her one of a kind, romantic whisper of a black lace dress.