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78 Upstairs  Parents’ Room The Photo of Granny Buby corseted and scowling in a gold frame stands on my mother’s dresser where every morning she sits down to put on her face. I can’t imagine how she goes out in the world marked with that look from a woman who wouldn’t climb the stairs to help when she hemorrhaged or lift a finger to arrange a flower for her wedding. She and her daddy did that. Why she faces that face every morning I cannot comprehend unless it’s to say Even you could not stop me Upstairs  Parents’ Room 79 but when after almost dying she came home from a tour of hospitals and found the ornaments in her room had been removed for cleaning the first thing she carried back to put her world to rights was that picture. ...

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