Margo's idea of getting ready was to wash her face with plain soap and water, comb her hair and brush her teeth. End of story.

"It's o.k. to be poor, but you can't be filthy," she'd explain.

She was proud of the fact that she'd purchased a tooth brush with her first wages at the age of twelve. "People didn't brush their teeth back then," she'd say. "You should have seen how they looked, with their teeth all green and black like that." The toothbrush served her well: she had perfect teeth well into her eighties.

She didn't wear make-up. Her jewelry was pragmatic: a wedding ring to announce her status, a watch to read the time, and a medal of Christ to keep in God's good graces. She'd wear the brooches she'd receive for Christmas or Mother's day. It was her duty to wear whatever was gifted but it would have never occurred to ask for it. The closest she came to acquiring jewelry was when she puchased a small silver medal of Mary from the Mt Des Cats monastery (she gave me the medal).

She wore flat shoes with shoelaces and owned one purse that she took out of the closet on Sundays. She rotated through four or five polyester dresses and a handful of blouses, and never worried about her weight. She cooked with butter, drank wine and ate the leftovers before finishing a meal. Witht the years and an expanding waistline, the thin belt she wore over her dress took on more of a symbolic than a practical role. Eventually, the belt came to rest a couple of inches below her breasts. It stayed there to the end.

Prepared

She wore a cardigan year round. The worst would have been to die of "un chaud et un froid" (a spell of "hot and cold").

She worried about drafty places and sudden changes in the weather. She needn't have worried; Dunkirk is windy and rainy nine months out of the year.

Every three or four years, she'd knit herself a new hat and gloves and perhaps a cardigan.

She wore a man's scarf over her raincoat, a plastic protector over her hat and zippered boots that hugged her calves. She fastened steel clamps to the sole of her shoes during ice storms, never forgot her handkerchief and her house key.

Her key ring held a miniature replica of a rubber boot, an old gift from a shoe salesman. She kept her coinpurse in her coat pocket where no thief would reach. There never was a thief to be found on the "rue de la Republique" (Republic Street). Still, she was prepared.

Work

"I dreamed of my grandmother last night," I tell Stan. "I was so happy to see her."

"I know she is watching over you," he says. "You had a hard week at work. Did she have any advice for you?"

She didn't.

We never talked about my work anyway. She was proud of my achievements, would tell neighbors and visitors that I had "a good position" with a university. What I did was a mystery to her.

She had completed the fifth grade and gone to work at age 12, ironing clothes and sheets in the back of a laundry operation. A year later, she had found a position as an apprentice hat-maker and had worked for the hat shop until my mother was born in 1940. She had stayed home then and had worked on keeping a home, raising children, making clothes and tending to the garden. When my grandfather retired from his job as an accountant in the mid 70's, she complained that she would never get to retire from her endless house chores.

She never understood office politics, never suspected the existence of such things as performance evaluations, mission statements, financial reports or strategic plans. She was only concerned that I should have a stable job - preferrably the same until retirement.

"Are they treating you well?" she'd ask.

"Yes"

"Do you work long hours?"

"Sometimes."

"You are too skinny: skin on bones. You need to eat more."

"I eat fine."

"Do you have a hot meal everyday?"

"I prefer salads."

"That's not real food. How can you live on salads? Do you sleep well?"

"I sleep fine."

"You look tired."

I was always too skinny and tired for Margo, too involved with work, too busy, too hurried.

"It's not good to work so much," she'd say.

Perhaps she was right.

Her kitchen

This was her kitchen.

She was a traditional cook. She left the house around 10:00 a.m. every morning with a wicker basket to do her round. She walked a half mile to the butcher shop and backtracked home: cheese shop, bakery, vegetable stall.

She only bought enough for a day and just enough for each meal.

You couldn't drop by announced and expect her to feed you, except for eggs perhaps and potatoes. She ordered a half-ton of potatoes dumped into the cellar every winter. When I was very small, she also ordered a half-ton of coal for the stove. Later, she switched to gas.

She cooked three meals a day every day. On Sunday mornings my grandfather would come down first and make the coffee. On mother's day he'd treat her to a restaurant where she judged the food was never as good as the one she made. She cooked traditional northern French food: stews, boiled cod, sausage and peas, heart with spinach, kidneys in tomato sauce, tongue, soles with shrimp, and potatoes, always lots of potatoes, boiled, fried, sauteed, pureed but never baked (something about the Germans and the war...) She couldn't imagine life without potatoes. She didn't like rice, found pasta suspicious.

On special Sundays, she'd make puffed potatoes from balls of puree she'd fry in a large pot of grease. The puffs came out crispy and golden and burned our mouths on the first bite. She told us to slow down. We never did.

Never forever

It had never occurred to me that Margo would die. Not for real. Pretty silly thing to say for a someone in her mid-forties. Sure I knew that everyone died. Just not Margo (or me, or my children for that matter).

She'd been there since my birth. Why wouldn't she be there forever?

I last kissed her as she was lying in a coma at the Dunkirk hospital, two weeks before she died. One kiss on the forehead and a "goodbye", as if we were meant to meet again. And we did, sort of. I flew back for the funeral, saw her one last time at the viewing. She didn't quite look like herself: her fingers were strangely flat, her hair brushed the wrong way, her cheeks were cold and hard, her jewelry gone.

I couldn't eat much for weeks afterwards: oranges and soup, soup and oranges, and then more oranges. I called it "the funeral diet". It took me a whole year to cry. A year! There seemed to be no end to the pain.

But it's been almost three years since she's died and I am no longer crying. Years ago, I met a woman at work who'd lost her five-year old son to leukemia. "You cry until you get yourself sick with grief," she had said. "And then one day, someone says something funny and you start laughing. And believe me, that part is even stranger than all the crying. How can we be wired to get over the loss of the people we love? Just like that? When my son died, I thought I would cry forever. It doesn't work that way."

So Margo didn't last forever and neither did my grief for her. I wish I could say I feel her by my side at all times, but I don't. I conjure memories of her, and talk about her to whoever will listen, and I write this blog. Bust she has stopped visiting my dreams. Sometimes I'm afraid I will never cry for her again.

Would she forgive me for that?

The wedding picture

They were married in the winter of 1938. She had sewn her own dress with the help of her mother. Her team of fellow hat-makers had helped her design her head-dress.

It was the only time that Jean would wear a tuxedo and white tie.

For the rest of their lives together, they slept under a large framed copy of their wedding portrait. That picture came to symbolize who they were. It survived the war. It was sacred to them, not to fall into the wrong hands.

Margo had always been appalled at the sight of old family pictures for sale at the flea market.

"I can't believe anyone could do this to their family!" she'd say. She was unable to imagine that anyone could be forgotten by their kin, their sepia portrait mildewing in a rickety frame. In those days, she could remember the names and relationships of people in several photo albums. She had stories about every one of them. Stories that were linked together in a meandering recollection of events.

"This here," she would say. "is your grandfather's sister. I never liked her. Your grandfather had two brothers and a sister. Their father died when he was just ten. He was the youngest. The sister and the older brothers had to go to work to help their mother. But your grandfather was allowed to study past fifth grade. His mother cleaned houses. I never liked the sister. She had a filthy mouth. Always swearing and saying bad things. I don't understand people who do this. We didn't mix with her very much. She did come to our wedding. I think she may have been pregnant with her second at the time. Let me seen, your mother was born in 1940 and she and so-and-so are 3 years apart, so that makes so-and-so a year older that she because I remember..." And on and on.

Shortly before he took his own life, Jean destroyed the big wedding portrait. He made sure that neither he nor Margo would ever end up for sale. A handful of smaller copies can be found in the family album. I took a snapshot of this one on the day before Jean's funeral.

Margo would disapprove of my publishing their picture on a public blog. But she is gone now. And I want to world to see how smart and hoepful she and Jean were on their wedding day.

The road

Jean and Margo met on the road that runs east-west parallel to the North sea, crossing every town along the coast. A windy, rain-beaten road bordered by long canals used to transport coal from the mines in Douai,fifty miles south, to the Dunkirk harbor and to Belgium and the Netherlands.

They walked two miles to work, four times a day, to commute from their parents' houses in St. Pol sur mer to their jobs on either side of the Jean Bart Plazza in Dunkirk. She was a hatmaker. He was an apprentice accountant for the French Electricity Company. She'd completed fifth grade. Since he was the youngest of his family, with two older brothers supporting his mother, he'd been allowed to study through the eighth grade and learn a trade.

Neither of them was allowed to frequent the dance halls or the beach. The road was where they socialized with people their age, most of them school friends or friends of relatives.

They'd seen each other plenty of times before Jean got the nerves to approach her. They were eighteen and it was a long courtship. Her father was very strict; she'd half made her mind to forego marriage and become a nun. But Jean was patient and determined - two qualities that would sustain him throughout life - he was also bold.

Long after they'd started walking together and Margo was still refusing to hold his hand or come close, he invited her to spend a few moments in the downtown park after work. He'd borrowed a camera from a friend. Althoug she wouldn't have her picture taken with him, she agreed to snap pictures of each other standing under an elm.

A few days later, Jean spent an evening cutting out his portrait with his mother's sewing scissors. He carefully glued the cutout next to Margo's own portrait and the next time he met her on the road, offered the picture of the made-up couple.

The cutout portrait was a decisive moment in their relationship. She had needed help visualizing her future with this good looking man who rode a red bicyle and wore a leather coat. He'd made her laugh. She started to hold his hand discreetly and to engage in a long battle with her father to earn her right to her own life and happiness.

The cut-out picture of Jean and Margo holds no special place in the family album. To them, it was but a small incident in their lige together, far less important their actual wedding day six years later. In fact, you would have to know what to look for to notice my grandfather's handiwork.

The love letters

In the months before he committed suicide, my grandfather destroyed all the letters he and Margo had written to each other during their long engagement and his five years as a POW in Germany. But I did find two small handmade cards in the drawer of their nightstand.

The first, in Margo's large, round handwriting simply says: "A good feast day and a big kiss. Margot." On the opposite page, the artist who drew the card wrote a few verses from Musset:

"Do not believe that my heart

Could ever forget you

It could cease beating

But never stop loving you."

The other card is a small rectangle of Bristol paper. Someone - perhaps Jean or one of his fellow POWs - painted a Lily-of-the-valley (Margo's favorite flower, which she grew outside the kitchen door) and a small pink flower. The other side is covered in Jean's tiny scrawl:

"My dear, I am sending you this small card for the birthday of our little Monique and for yours as well, in memory of the Lily-of -the-valley I was able to give you in years past on May 1st. Best wishes and tender kisses. Yours. Jean."

And below a thin line:

"Big kisses to Monique on her special day. I hope that she will like the card from her dad."

I wonder if the restrained tone of both cards had to do with the censors that read the mail between the POWs and their families. Or was it that my grandparents' formality extended to their private lives? They were never outwardly tender toward each other, except at the very end, when Margo lost her sight. Jean would hold her hand then, and do small things for her. And he did mourn her for sixteen long months before deciding to take his life.

"She was such a good woman" he kept repeating the days following the funeral. "Such a good woman." As if he'd just come to the realization.

A private war

If you believed Margo, only three people died in World War II: the wife and fourteen-year-old daughter of her oldest brother Arthur, and her second odlest brother, Edgar.

She had heard of the Jewish Holocaust. She had even shared once how sorry she'd felt for a woman her age whom she'd seen in the Paris metro. The woman, who had been holding a baby, wore the Jewish star sewn to her coat. Margo hadn't given more details.

She had flown the pocket of Dunkirk on foot with her parents and my three-month-old mother, yet she never talked about the soldiers who had been trapped on the beach. All of her stories were about the family: how they'd slept in a barn and she'd woken up with a mouse nesting in her hair, how worried she'd been about breastfeeding my mother, how she'd looked for my grandfather among the POW's who were being held at the soccer stadium and how a friend of the family with a special pass and a bicycle had traveled to the farm where grandpa had been stationed. The farm had been bombed. My grandfather was the only survivor and had been transferred to a field hospital ten kilometers away, an impossible distance to travel with all the German troops barring the movement of civilians.

She never bothered with history as much as she fussed about food, clean clothes and family gatherings. She mailed maps of Germany hidden in homemade jars and breads to my grandfather. She searched the Parisian grocery stores for rare imported bananas to feed my fragile mother. She wore a coat over her nightgown so the neighbors wouldn't see her ungirdled body during air raids. She kept to her laundry schedule no matter the circumstances. She was bothered that the food would get cold when dinner was interrupted by sirens.

Hers was a war of food rations, sleepness nights, letters from the Red Cross and worries about her husband and brothers. "We were lucky," she used to say. "to have lost only three people." And she would sigh at the memory of her favorite brother, blown to bits in the process of demining the beach. She believed that her sorrow was enough. To each his family, her heart was too tender to reach out to the other five million dead.

Noses and handkerchiefs

I have her nose. Not a cute button nose but a prominent, slightly bulbous, utilitarian nose, designed to detect the ripeness of fresh fruit, the danger of rotten fish and the urgency of soiled diapers. That nose can catch of whiff of baking bread from the factory three miles away. It retains its ability to taste food during the worst colds.

It drips a lot.

Fluids gather from mysterious caves around and above the eyes and, like the shallow rivers of Flanders, make a slow continuous journey toward the outer edge of the nostril where they must be caught before falling onto our food, newspaper or - God forbid - the collection plate during Sunday service.

Margo always carried a large cotton handkerchief.

She kept a big stack of them, ironed and pressed in the small cabinet in a corner of the dining room. Every few years, she'd buy a new dozen from a linen salesman at the market, but I always liked the old handkerchiefs better. Worn to the thickness of tissue paper, they held the permanent scent of the laundry detergent that Margo used and they had become soft from many boilings in the Monday laundry (the day for whites).

For Margo, the handkerchief was an all purpose tool. Not only would it catch drips from her nose or any other family nose (she felt entitled to pinch any kid's nose at any moment and demand a strong blowing action), but it could also be used to spit-clean dirty faces, to bandage scraped knees, to protect from the sun (tied around the neck or worn over the head with a knot at each of the corners), to carry berries, leaves, flowers, rocks and assorted treasures gathered on family trips, to protect lunch from the filth of a public picnic table, to wipe soot, tears, grease, dirt, and anything else she deemed needed to be wiped away from this world.

I haven't used a cloth handkerchief in years. I don't even think I could find any in the US. The other day I wiped my nose on the sleeve of my T-shirt. A terrible thing to do. I could feel Margo frowning from above.

The blue room

She kept a portrait of the pope on the wall in the blue room that had been my mother's bedroom. After my mother had gotten married, my great-grandfather had occupied the bedroom until his death in 1964.

I liked sleeping in the room, with its blue curtains and the cotton bedspread that my grandmother had sewn from two different remnants of flower-printed fabric. The oblong bedspread had only two side skirts: for the length and width of the bed that were not against the wall. Margo didn't like wasting fabric on things that couldn't be seen but the bedspread kept slipping off the bed.

The wool mattress, mixed with horsehair, was as old and thin and curved in the middle. It was like sleeping in a narrow canoe. You had to stay put or risk severe back pain the following day.

It was the most religious of all the rooms too. Apart from the pope's portrait, there was a crucifix above the door and a virgin Mary on the night table. Cast in white plastic, the virgin glowed in the dark at night.

Thanks to the Virgin, the Pope, the Crucifix, and the heavy bedspread, the blue room was the safest place on earth where to fall asleep. The great-grandfather must have have died peacefully enough because he never came back to haunt the room. The linoleum flooring didn't creak. Doors stayed shut. In the darkness, the Virgin would see me to sleep. The last thing I would hear would be my grandparents whisper their goodnights next door and then everything would go quiet. I knew I could open my eyes in the middle of the night and the Virgin would be there, keeping watch and that was good enough for me.

The felt slippers

Here are Margo's slippers. I took the picture the last time I was alone in my grandparent's house, shortly after grandpa's funeral. My aunt and uncle were kind enough to give me about a half hour to look through the house. I pulled my camera out of my purse and started taking pictures of every object that I thought might mean something to me.

I spotted the slippers at their usual place near the kitchen door. They had been there since my grandmother had died sixteen months earlier. Her clothes, shoes and most of her possessions had been given away within days of her funeral, but for some reason, the slippers had escaped notice. I wonder whether they might have been a source of comfort to my grandfather. Perhaps he liked to sit in the kitchen and let himself believe that Margo was about to come through the front door, remove her street shoes and put her slippers on, as she always did when she was indoors.

The housekeeper hand't thrown them away.

The slippers were almost new. Margo hadn't had time to flatten the back. Then again, she no longer walked as much as she once had. She used to roam the house, making a distinct "thump-thump" noise with her heel whenever she moved. And she moved a lot, fetching the soup pot from the outdoor pantry, filling her iron with water, opening the windows to air the bedroom, climbing up to the bedrooms, down the basement, and from room to room as she completed her cycle of chores. Back when I was in sixth grade, the noise of her feet annoyed me.

"Why can't you lift your feet off the floor when you walk for God's sake?" I accused her one day.

She had shrugged.

"What are you talking about?" she said. "There's nothing wrong with my feet."

She wasn't about to be budge for a twelve year old.

I wished I had taped the sound of her feet on the tiled floor. Heck, I wished I had taped the sound of her voice. It's been two years. I can remember the "thump-thump" noise but I have trouble bringing back her voice. Where did it go? What part of me holds that memory?

The lost needles

She owned three sets of thin metal knitting needles: one for socks and gloves, one for baby clothes, the third for sweaters. She despised lazy thick yarns, wouldn't have dreamed of wooden needles or fancy wools.

She bought her yarn on sale at a stall in the open market, picked colors that would outlast stains and wear. She stuck to a sturdy stockinet stitch with an occasional cable, and for girly outfits, a row of lace. She knit socks, mittens, hats, underwear, bathing suits, dresses, sweaters, cardigans, scarves and booties. She knit cotton socks for the Dominican sisters' mission in Africa. She knit my brother's school sweaters with reinforced elbow pads. And when she knit me a white poncho with a blue trim and a double pom-pom closure, she also made a small replica of the poncho for my doll Henriette.

She knit in the afternoons during the time alloted for such work but didn't want anyone to think she was having any fun at it. She has clad three generations of children in navy raglan sweaters that could be partially unravelled and lenghtened to accomodate growth spurts. She had saved my grandfather's fingers from frostbite with the mittens she'd mailed to the POW camps in Germany. She had prevented colds and pneumonia with yard-long scarves that wrapped around the head and chest.

Without her steady knitting, we would have been sure to perish to the dampness of the Dunkirk winters. Her needles, bent from years of being tucked under her arms, were her swords of woolly love.

Shortly after she died, I searched through the house in hope of finding the needles but she had already disposed of them. She would have been loathed to throw them away - such fine needles, hardly bent by sixty-years of steady work. I imagined she must have shipped them to the Dominican mission in Africa . Somehwere in the world a woman is using those needles to knit a cotton poncho for a young girl.

Arrival

Margo was 49 years old when I was born, just four years older than what I am today. The official story is that I was born shortly around midnight. By the time my father could go to my grandparents' house to tell them of my arrival, everybody was asleep. They didn't hear the doorbell and didn't know about their second grandchild until the following morning.

But in my heart, I know that Margo had dreamed of me that night.

We became inseparable.

I believe she and I had cycled through many lives before. This spin lasted 43 years: Margo departed on June 10, 2006. I can still feel her presence in my heart. I wear her apron when I cook.

This is our story.