Covering the Mirrors

After a funeral, they were covered with black cloth, some draped with shawls like a scalloped valance. Leftover sewing scraps, wool, linen, synthetic, anything to shroud the odd-shaped mirrors, though sometimes a corner was exposed like a woman whose ankle peeks forbidden from under a long skirt. A mourner must shun vanity during shiva, focusing inward but as a child I wondered if this were to avoid ghosts, for don't the dead take their time leaving? I'm of a generation where grandparents disappeared, great aunts with European accents, rarely an explanation provided to us children. My mother died too young. With a baby in arms I couldn't bear to fling that dark cloth over the glass. After all she had come back from the dead so often, even the doctors could not explain it. Each time I looked in a mirror my mother gazed back. I could never tell if she were trying to tell me something or to take the baby with her.