Mornings were always a RISKY time in our house. My mother was rather a WITCH for the first few hours of any given day. Almost any sound made her LIVID, the irony of course being how loud her anger. It filled the room and then there was the deafening return to silence.

However every once in awhile I sensed a rare levity in how she sat at the table or moved through the house. I always took advantage of these occasions to make her laugh. Like her anger, her delight was expressed with a fullness of sound.

One of the surest ways to elicit these peals was to mimic Meryl Streep’s frenetic “A DINGO ate my baby” line from the true crime movie about an Australian woman accused of murdering her small child.

It really wasn’t very funny- any of it, and yet there it was, a sure way to conjure connection if the air was just right. My mother wasn’t the only witch in the house.

Heather