There is a country — I read about it once — where the local custom is that if you go to a house and praise some small possession, the owners feel obliged to offer it to you as a gift. The only other place I know of with such a custom is my mother’s apartment.

Knowing Mama, I have always been careful with my compliments, but that doesn’t stop her. If she catches me staring at anything small enough to put in a grocery bag, she hands it to me as I leave. It would do no good to protest. “I was merely staring at that photograph of Mount Hood because I have one exactly like it in my living room.” Mama would only nod and say, “Of course. You were thinking how nice it would be to have a set. If a mother doesn’t understand, who does?”

As far as I can remember, Mama was telling people they were in the wrong line of work and suggesting alternative careers. My turn came when I grew up and became a housewife. “You missed your calling,” Mama sighs, examining the doodles (涂鸦) on my phone book. “You should have been an artist.” Later, I tell her how I returned rancid fish to the supermarket and demanded a refund, and she links this to lawyer. I know it’s horsefathers, but I like it.

I have been worrying for weeks now about what to give my mother for Mother’s Day. There is always the danger that a gift given to Mama will bounce swiftly back to the giver. If I buy her something wearable, she perceives in an instant that it could be let in here, let out there, and it would fit me perfectly. If I give her a plant, she cuts off the top for me to take home and root in a glass of water. If I give her something edible, she wants me to stay for lunch and cat it.

Papa, a sensible man, long ago stopped trying to shop for Mama. Instead, on Mother’s Day, her birthday, and other appropriate occasions, he composes a short poem in which he tells of their life. After nearly 30 years of poems, Papa sometimes worries that the edge of his inspiration has dulled, but Mama doesn’t complain. She comes into the room while he is struggling over a gift poem and says, “It doesn’t have to rhyme (押韵) as long as it’s from the heart.”

This year, finally, I think, too, have found a painless gift for Mama. I am going to give her a magazine article, in which I wish her “Happy Mother’s Day” and tell her there’s nothing Papa or I could ever buy, find, or make her that would be half good enough anyway.

The 30 miles of road winds its way through the mountains of Logan Canyon.It is enough to make most drivers frightened.

But Roger Andersen,a 46-yearold father of four,hadn't expected any trouble on the road on last New Year's Eve when he set off for a ski trip to the Bear River Mountains with his three children.The weather was good for traveling on the slopes（坡）,but the higher they drove,the steeper（陡峭的）the roads became.All of a sudden,the car ran toward the cold Logan River out of control and sank into the water.

There was no time to tell the kids what to do.Within seconds,the car was filled with water."It was frightening that we were completely underwater so fast,remembers Andersen.Confused about the directions,Andersen began to search the freezing water for the kids,but however hard he tried he couldn't find them."If I don't get out,maybe none of us are able to get out."Andersen got out of his seat belt,swam through a broken window to the surface.That was when he saw a group of men,about ten in all,appear on the road.One after another,they raced down and jumped into the water,shouting,"Who else is in the car?"Andersen says thankfully,"It was like the sight of angels."

As the kids fully recovered in the following weeks,Andersen felt eager to thank the men who had saved them.He was surprised to learn that the group was a search-and-rescue team,who knew how to help the kids stay alive.

"It's just unbelievable that you'd have so many people there who knew how to do it,"says Andersen."Many people have asked me,'Did you witness a miracle（奇迹）there?' I always say,'I witnessed dozens.'"

I keep remembering odd things: the way she loved daffodils, jokes she told at the dinner table, the look in her eyes when she talked about my future. I knew about college before I’d never heard of high school was Mom’s second chance at the degree she never had.

Her parents pushed her too much, too hard, and she always wished she hadn’t let the pressure defeat her. She dropped out of college after one term for marriage and a secretarial job. While she never regretted marrying my father, she always regretted giving up her dream of becoming an accountant. She was determined her eldest daughter would never miss an opportunity.

One of the most extremely special times of my life was Christmas in my second school year, when I played Tiny Tim in a local community theater production of “A Christmas Carol.” Mom delighted in my endless rehearsal stories and spent hours helping me work out ways of disguising my long hair. There’s a line in the show: “And it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.” Change the pronouns and that sentence describes Mom perfectly.

She was the one person I could talk to about anything. She was right about so much, so often—much more than I gave her credit for at the time.

I never imagined she wouldn’t be here now. I never thought cancer could strike so quickly, could kill someone so strong and determined in only a year. She’s the one person I couldn’t imagine living without; now, since last January, I’ve had to. Suddenly, I have no one to talk to about meaningless little things, no one whose advice I trust completely to help me with decisions. When I come home from school, I come home to an empty house, troubled by memories of the year she spent here dying. I remember the disastrous Thanksgiving when she was feeling terrible, and our wonderful last Christmas Eve together.

What I feel cheated of is the future we’ll never have.