11:47 p.m. This is a really hard one to write. Today is the birthday of the most powerful woman in the entire world. My mother.

I do not have a sentimental mother. She is tough as nails. I'm not nearly as strong. In fact, the more I look at these pictures the more I regress into the babbling child with the bug.

I think my mother was enjoying herself the afternoon my father took these pictures ... burning the garbage and stirring the ashes and hitting the insides of the can back and forth with the big long stick she has in her hand. She is probably the most competent person in the world, man or woman. She can do anything.

So of course the stick was just right for the task. She had a lot of big sticks -- there was actually a collection of them back there somewhere in that yard, along with the stacked cinderblocks and the nested tomato baskets.

She used another stick, a broken broomstick handle of similar weight and heft, to stir the pot of swiss chard on the stove when she made pasta fazool. Greens 'n beans; she grew all her own big fat vegetables. She got bursitis from hand-turning almost an acre of chicken manure into the hard clay garden soil each year with a big sharp pitchfork.

Her favorite flower is the gladioli, but she can't pronounce it. Or aluminum. Her favorite color is purple. She once grew rows of prize purple gladioli, dark as night, along the side of the house where I played a catch-ball counting game with myself against the brick wall. Always being careful not to hit the tall, prissy, fragile stems.

Forgive me for my shattered, fragmented thoughts. Pictures will do that to you.