n Saturday, after realizing her father was dying, my mother caught cancer. Like a rodent, it burrowed into her grief and built its nest in a soft place at the back of her tongue. The cancer hid there spreading its tiny claws, collecting the bitten off words, her swallowed grievances, packing them into its hard belly, until my mother's mouth began to ache and fester each day. While she was stirring her tea Monday morning and discussing the mortgage with my stepfather, a pearl earring I lost several years ago fell out of her mouth and onto the breakfast table. She examined the earring closely, asked if it were mine and resumed her complaint about the rising cost of earthquake insurance. Wednesday, she was brushing her teeth before bed and found a line of renaissance poetry she hadn't heard since college—With how sad steps, Oh Moon, thou climbst the skies!

Friday was a holiday. The four of us girls were out in the yard with mom raking leaves from under the persimmon trees and clipping back the rose bushes. Our mother began to sing a Beatles' song and we joined in the chorus—Black bird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly—and as she held this note, two chickadee hatchlings flew out of her open mouth and up to the highest branch on the tree beside her.

Our neighbor Ms. Harper, who notices everything loudly, happened to be looking over our adjoining fence and began to scream about birds living in my mother's mouth and fruit trees and black magic, so that the other neighbors came out onto the sidewalk to point fingers and peer over at us.

My stepfather felt obliged to keep up appearances. He made a dentist appointment for mother and drove her there himself, but when Dr. Bear looked into her mouth all he could see were his own neglected dreams of mountains and hunting. So he referred her to a specialist and moved to Montana. The specialist was an over worked woman of middle age, with keen eyes and a surgeon's articulate fingers. She examined mother's tongue thoroughly and when she looked down her throat, saw the light of her soul spilling out. This was cause for concern. The following evening, the surgical team removed the cancerous growth from my mother's mouth and also recovered a large portion of their youth, which they had left between the pages of books during the long years of medical school.

The hospital released mother a day later and though she lost a quarter of her tongue along the right side, she began to talk more clearly and tell more truths than she ever had before.