It takes my mom time to remember everything, and some of the years are still foggy. The days before I was born are vivid to her—her time hunting witches, meeting my dad, hiding her books, that terrible night at the hospital—but the years since then are hazy. What’s not hazy is how much she loves me.

I am getting to see who she really is, and coming to know the person who once filled my room with wonder and colors and powerful words. That person has exploded into my world, and I see why the witches feared her.

She is curious. She listens much harder than she speaks and plows through books and newspaper articles, soaking up things like a sponge.

She is angry in a way that makes me feel strong.

“Nobody’s doing anything about the polar bears?” she demands, the edge of a fight in her voice. “We’ll see about that, Rosie,” she adds, as if she thinks anything can be fixed if you just have the right strategy. She has that “We’ll see about that” tone in her voice about a lot of things—a mixture of rage and purpose. Her voice is colorful and lively at these moments—like gravel and roses. (At other times, when she’s just talking with me about nothing at all, it lilts like a feather in a breeze.)

She is efficient—not one for moping over what she’s lost. One of the first things she does is tackle my room: organizing my books, replacing all the notes I’ve put on the walls with notes of her own:

You are a magnificent creature.

You are a miracle.

You are funny, you are smart, you are brave.

She is tireless, and when she’s not tending to me, or reading, or working, she’s creating. Painting everything she can see—the sea, the trees, me. Only, she doesn’t just paint what’s there—she captures something elusive: the hopefulness of a tree, the mystery of the ocean and what is lost in it, the sadness in my eyes when I think about my brother. She says that—like poetry and stories—art is a way of looking for something true. “A great man once said, ‘An artist is here to disturb the peace.’ That means an artist makes people think twice about what they don’t think about hard enough.”

She is hard to look away from—with cleverness and interest in her eyes.

But she is also, oftentimes, lost. She spends many days in and out of a fog, fearful and weak. “Life can sometimes break something inside you,” she says, “and sometimes you can’t fix it.” By “life,” she means what happened to my brother.