For months Mom has approached me in the kitchen or in my home office to read to me snippets of her old letters recounting my birth in Brazil in 1964.  “…they laid him on my stomach…he sure has a big cry…he has very long fingers and feet…he does not have poky-out ears…he is very funny looking (as all newborns are)…he is beautiful to me.”  Then follows the historical material for their favorite family stories about me, which Dad delights to tell the assembled family on my birthdays: “We seem to be living in a jungle of diapers.  We have no laundry facilities [and] do all our laundry by hand.  We hang [diapers] in the kitchen, bathroom, over chairs and tables…we iron them dry and put them away.”  How can I divert her attention to something else, I wondered.  And I recalled having a stack of a hundred letters she wrote to me from 1983-85 when I served my Church as a volunteer missionary in Portugal, letters which I saved but which no one has read in 40 years.  With Dad in a hospital and care facility for a month, I have taken to reading aloud one of her 1980s letters each evening after dinner.  She chuckles at the busyness of life as a mother of young children, the piano lessons, allergy shots, band concerts, basketball games, school snow days, choir rehearsals, prom disappointments, bouts with the flu, reading Newberry books, Sunday church meetings, and watching the bats at dusk.  On October 25, 1983, Mom recounted how she bought a tie for my then three-year-old brother Steven.  “He wears it to church every Sunday.  He looks very grown up.  He said…last night, ‘When I was a little boy, I was big!’  After church he went around the house singing ‘Jesus wants me for a Sun Bean!’”  On March 6, 1984, she sympathized with my homesickness and discouragement, wishing she could “make things easier” for me, and reassuring me that “everything here at home is fine.  We get tired and discouraged just like everyone else, but we keep going, we bounce back.  I’m always at it.  I have to make sure that I create the right feeling here at home with EACH child as much of the time as possible.  That is really not easy.  I never give up, though.  I have to keep trying.”  She was 44 years old.  On November 15, 1983, she reminisced, “There are so many things a mother feels for her children.  They are just very dear to her.  She remembers nursing them as tiny infants, carrying them around as little children, making cakes and going on walks with them as they get bigger, taking care of their things, helping them in school, etc.  Then, when the children leave, it is hard for her.  The empty bedroom, the missing place at the table, all the little things that were fixed or made better [by the child].  At the same time, it is right that children leave.  They grow and become independent and contributing adults.  That’s the way of it.  It’s right.”  And she ended that now 40-year-old letter with the sweetest of sentiments: “You will always be a part of me and I will always love you without limit.”  At age 59, as I again live with her and help care for her, her feelings for me (and my five siblings) are just as tender, and she looks at me still as her little boy.  I cannot be that little boy, that infant.  I am a grown man with my own life and children, and grandchildren.  But I am still her son, and she deserves in return the same sweetness she has given to me all of my life.