This morning, when my mother handed me a cup of coffee and her weekly column to edit (anyone who knows my mother well, knows that storytelling is her great strength, and editing is her great weakness), I thought "Isn't this silly. Instead of editing a story about my grandmother, I should hijack the opportunity and thank my mother for the greatest gift she has given to me, and that is the ability to see beauty in the everyday and commonplace.

When I was a little girl, my mother owned a Studebaker car that my grandmother had purchased for her. The car had no radio. We often, my mother and I, would take weekend excursions to visit distant relatives, or simply to see a part of the Northeast (an area of the country where we were living) that we had not seen before. These drives were, for me, the most exciting part of journey. My mother would tell me long, intricate stories full of detail and suspense about her youth, as she pointed out things along the road that she felt were important for me to see. Often, she would punctuate a sight with words like "Do you know how fortunate you are, child, to see this? It won't be here forever?" or "Do you realize child that a soldier from the War of Northern Aggression stood in the very same place you are standing this very second? Can you believe that?"

My mother had a way of dramatizing and elevating the mundane and the seemingly ordinary to new heights of extraordinary for me.

This gift she gave me went unappreciated for many years. In fact, during high school and much of college, I wanted her to put it in a box and hide it in the back of closet -- especially when my friends were around. My mother's "dramatic" take on the beauty of someone's front-yard tree or how a sunset reminded her of a particular poem, which she would then recite (even though it might go on for a endless five minutes) with a British accent and her hand clenched over her heart, would cause me to cringe, hold my breath and roll my eyes. My friends always thought she was so "cool" but, honestly, I could not see what they saw.

Today, I am older than she was then, but her effect on me is deep and palpable. I do not write. I cannot describe in words as well as she the beauty I see around me. I have chosen a different medium of expression. I have chosen a camera to record all that I see that to many people may seem ordinary, but because of my mother, Shirley Gleicher, looks extraordinary to me.