Columnist Susan Snyder: A gifted woman turns 80 today

Thursday, May 19, 2005 | 8:16 a.m.

Two photographs on my desk show a woman awash in sunshine standing at the edge of a precipice and calmly gazing across the canyons below.

It's hard to believe she is afraid of heights and sunburns easily.

She certainly is not the same woman who slathered us with sunscreen and pumped that imaginary brake pedal when Dad drove us through the Rockies one summer.

Though I've known her all my life, the woman in the photos is someone I didn't know at all.

She wears a checked broomstick skirt of an unknown color -- the 1946 photo is black and white. Encircling her wrists are silver Navajo cuff bracelets that now belong to me.

She is slender, stunning and traveling on her own along Rocky Mountain National Park's Trail Ridge Road.

Women of her day typically were married at 21. But it would be four more years before she took wedding vows and another six before she bore her first child, a son. Five years after that she would have her second, a daughter.

Today, she turns 80.

And though it's tempting to reflect on her roles as wife, mother and grandmother, the photos elicit a different view. They show the woman when she belonged to no one but herself and traveled wherever the mountains lured her.

She gave me the bracelets back in the 1970s when silver and turquoise was resurrected as a fad. I now wonder how she parted with them at all. They represent a period of her life when it was still her life.

I didn't know her back then, but opportunities to catch glimpses of the woman my mother used to be arose each time she gave a gift.

Other kids' moms gave them sweaters or pajamas on Christmas. Mine bought party dresses. She knew everyday clothes and daily drudgery would always come. But it would be a shame to miss a great spur-of-the-moment party for the lack of something to wear.

When I graduated from college and moved into my first apartment, she gave me a brand-new set of dishes and flatware for 12.

"Now you have a matched set of dishes," she said. "You don't have to get married to have them."

When I did marry, she let others buy Crock-Pots and daily kitchen tools. Her bridal shower gift was a milkshake machine. If you're going to spend time in the kitchen, she figured some of it needed to be for fun.

Picnic baskets, holiday linens, a set of Christmas dishes, glittering evening bags, binoculars -- Mom's gifts never said, "Don't go. Stay home. Come back."

They said, "Go. Get out and play. Entertain. Make your life interesting for yourself. Friends, love and success will follow."

They always have.

The woman in the photos is confident, free to do as she pleases and obviously traveling life's journey with one of her favorite people -- herself.

Long before the husband, the children and society's other expectations, she gazed out over the landscape and considered all her possibilities. Eventually, she chose us.

I wish it were possible to wrap up that moment and give it back to her as she celebrates her 80th year today.

But we'll have to settle for looking at the photos and remembering that deep down inside, she's still the woman who has everything.