REALITY?: Living and Writing It

I realize that as I carry the plates back to the kitchen with one hand, I lick a finger of the other and round up and stick the poppyseeds off the plate and lick them off again.  My mother used to do this; thus my frugal nature perhaps, or just the game of it, I do not know.  But I can see her clearly  as a child imprints her mother in her mind, smiling, as if the greatest satisfaction of a roast beef sandwich on a roll were in these poppyseeds that have fallen off with every bite. This is an old, old memory, so much older than the one that barges in impudently hellbent on destruction of a life: a woman who is my mother only vacant and unyielding, eyes dead to the life around her, focused only on the tiny black specks of pepper in her soup and with poised spoon, she attempts to pick them out because she will not eat them.