My mother, however, in her day to day life, is truly unusual. I have never known her to be afraid of anything or anyone; with the possible exception of Hattie, our old housekeeper who came daily when we were little to watch over us but mostly to clean the house from top to bottom. She was always scrambling onto counters to get dust from behind cabinets and scrubbing every inch of tile on the bathroom floor. I think you could say Hattie had a touch of OCD before it became trendy. "Mrs. Battles," she'd say to my mother, "those dirty curtains have got to come down and I need a new step ladder to get to that dirty ceiling." "Yes, Hattie," my mother would say submissively. "Anything you want." I think my mother was scared to death that Hattie would one day up and leave her with the six kids and her 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. job as a pediatric nurse. This way she could come home to an immaculate house where Hattie ruled the roost.

But basically my mother feared no one and nothing else. Not something as everyday as rats, that's for sure. I remember when we had firewood put in the basement in storage. "You're gonna have rats," the delivery men told us. And rats we got. Such big ones that my neighbor Katie Dunlap shrieked and dropped her ginger ale one afternoon in the kitchen when a huge black rat darted along the baseboards. My mother, however, seemed to relish the rat challenge.

"Got some more!" she'd call gleefully coming up the cellar stairs carrying two big traps from which dangled massive glossy black dead rats. She was as happy as a ten year old clamming at the beach. She'd dump them in the trash and then think for a moment. "Now I gotta get me some stronger cheese," she said rooting around in the refrigerator. Until we caved in and called an exterminator, my mother cheerfully kept up her rat catching activities.

Bats didn't phase her either. One weekend when I was home reading in my bedroom, a huge black bird swooped over my book. I came yelling out of the room, "There's a bird in there!" My mother opened the door and went inside. "That's not a bird, it's just a bat, Cynthia," she said calmly as if bats were practically friendly. She headed downstairs for a broom. "Stay outside if it upsets you," she said and then I heard whamming and banging coming from behind the door. "Got him!" she called out happily and walked by carrying the dead bat by its broken wing to the toilet. This scene of my mother chasing bats around the house was repeated many times over the years. She always got her bat and seemed completely unruffled by each grisly adventure.

Besides being fearless, my mother could also keep a secret like nobody's business, whereas my father could not keep one for one day. I recall when my friend from Auckland, New Zealand came to my father's courthouse in Rutland, Vt., to surprise me. As I walked up the courthouse steps, my father whispered, "It's your friend Julie from New Zealand. She's in the office. She's here to surprise you. Act surprised," thereby ruining any chance of my acting surprised. My mother was the opposite. Once when I was in junior high, my friend Patty decided to throw me a surprise birthday party. The only problem was she invited the whole class and I had heard all about it. Every day I came home in agony and told my mother, "They're throwing me a surprise birthday party at Patty's and I know everything! How am I gonna act surprised? This is awful!"

On the afternoon of the party, I came home and my mother said, "Patty called. She feels really badly but the party has been called off. She wants you to come over anyway though and have cake with her and her mother." I rushed for the phone. "I knew it!" I told Patty. "But my mom told me the party is off and I'll come up anyway. I knew about it the whole time! I'm so relieved!" "So your mom told you the party was off?" Patty said. "Oh yeah, that's right! We feel really bad but come up at 7 anyway." When I arrived happy to find only Patty and her mother sitting there grinning away, they told me the cake was downstairs in the den. Patty and I opened the den door to darkness and whispering. "That's just my older brother Peter and his girlfriend making out," Patty said. "Go right on in." "No way!" I squealed before Patty pushed me in the room and my entire class jumped out yelling, "Surprise!" My mother had taken it upon herself to fool me. When I got home she was sitting in her chair reading Descartes. "Why did you fool me?" I asked. "Well, I couldn't put up with that whining a moment longer," she said before flipping the page.

That's another thing about my mother. She's a voracious reader. But not bestsellers or romance novels. Philosophy. History. Science. Um, Queen Victoria. Architecture. Cartography. Greek Shipbuilding. Who knows what dense subject next? I wouldn't even want to try to keep up with her. I always feel inadequate while she's reading, "Churchill: The War Years" and I'm content diving into "Get Happy" the new Judy Garland biography. Reading is my mother's hobby and also her reason for living. She'd be lost without her books. She has six going at one time. She lives at the library. The book store is always calling to inform her that her latest order is in. I suppose reading is why she's never been lonely or bored. At least this is what she told me one day when I was a teenager and suffering from depression. I came out of my bedroom, itself a feat, and came downstairs tearful. "What's wrong?" my mother asked. "I'm lonely and I'm bored," I said. There was a pause. "I think I can safely say that I've never been lonely and I've never been bored," she said simply as if thinking over these highly foreign concepts for the first time. I buried my head in my hands and sobbed. How could I have a mother who has never been lonely or bored? Lonely and bored were my life. My mother and I were so different. But I figured that was okay because my mother was different from everyone.

For one thing, she had superhuman energy. Only her energetic pursuits seemed to come and go in phases. Once she decided to plant a garden out back and spent every day out there digging and moving stones and shoveling and getting covered in dirt. The garden really started to come along. Until the next spring when I asked when she was going to start work on her garden. "Oh that?" she said. "I'm not gonna bother with that anymore." The garden patch became covered over with weeds. This fickleness also applied to when she ran for office from her district. She knocked on doors and wrote speeches and went to fundraisers. Until one morning she decided she didn't want to bother anymore with running. No amount of calls from party leaders could change her mind. I think she just liked to change course midstream.

I got to see her superhuman energy up close when we lived together in a rented house in Burlington after my first hospitalization. I was still quite sick. While I could barely get dressed in the morning, my mother would be out back raking the yard. Moving huge tree branches that had fallen on the lawn. Stacking piles of leaves. After that she would scrub the kitchen floor. All while I sat around smoking cigarettes and watching her work. Then she would go for a long walk before coming home to start these gigantic suppers of chicken casseroles and pork roasts. The next day she would iron 16 shirts, rake the front yard, polish the woodwork, vacuum the rugs, go for a walk and make another mammoth meal. She never slowed down. She had always had a lot of strength. She's only 5 foot 3 and 117 pounds but she used to arm wrestle my brothers on the living room carpet when they were young until one by one they started beating her hands down. Okay, she might not have been superhuman but she definitely was wiry.

I found this out firsthand the night my mother's wiriness blew my mind. I was in the hospital but out on a pass having dinner with my parents. I was not at all well and letting me out of the hospital so soon even on a 2-hour pass with my parents may not have been advisable. All during dinner, however, I behaved. I passed the rolls and made small talk. No alcohol. Prime rib! Isn't this nice? Cynthia's really coming right along. We're so proud. Bla bla bla. All the while, though, I was smiling and nodding and planning my escape from the hospital right after dinner.

After we paid the bill and headed out to the parking lot, I broke out in a run laughing my head off. "I'm heading for the hiiiiiiighway," I called back as I darted through this small park that was all that separated the restaurant from Route 7. "I'm going to direct the traffic! I'm not going back to that hospital. You can't stop me! Wheeeeee!" I heard my father yelling for someone to call the police. "Yes, call the police. They always give me such nice riiiiiides!" I laughed.

Suddenly, as I was going at a really good clip and almost out of the park, I felt a foot trip me up from the front and my mother pounce on me from behind as I went down into a faceful of dirt and wet leaves. "Hey!" I moaned but I couldn't move. My mind was completely blown. My mother had suddenly gone military and had her knee planted in the middle of my back. "Alright, get up slowly," she grunted pinning my arm around my back. I had no idea where she had picked up these guerilla tactics. My father was telling everyone it was alright but I think all the diners outside in the parking lot were hanging around expecting a really good family fight. All they got, though, was my mother marching me back arm-pinned to the car and my moaning, "Ow, Mom, that hurts!" Show was over. My parents stashed me in the front seat between them and we drove back to the hospital in stony silence. No more passes for quite a while.

Still, I learned something that night. Never underestimate my mother. She could go Rambo on you. But now I know she also probably saved my life that night.

I think what really stands out about my mother is her complete indifference to what others think or how things look. She was an extraordinary nurse because she brought this quality to her work and always gave 110 percent. My brother John told a story about one of his friends who was in the hospital pediatric ward with a broken leg. He had been resisting getting out of bed to practice walking again. My mother thought he was suffering from depression and lacked the will to try. "What do I have to do to get you out of that bed, young man?" my mother apparently asked the boy. "Why don't you go over there and just stand on your head?" he shot back. Then, according to my brother's friend, my mother walked to the corner of the room and in her nurse's uniform of a white dress and stockings, put her head on the floor and raised her feet up until she was really standing on her head, kicking her feet in the air. Then she fell heavily back down to the floor, dusted herself off and came back to the bed. "Well?" she said. The young kid couldn't stop laughing but managed to swing off the sheets and start getting out of the bed.

She was an amazing nurse. People would stop me on the street when I moved back to Rutland to ask if I was "Betsy's daughter." Then they would rhapsodize about the care she had once given their child. She never really climbed the corporate ladder at the hospital though because she was so strict. When she worked the night shift, she would ban the other nurses from reading fiction or writing cards all night to try to get them to study from medical textbooks.