By Rebecca Duclos

My mother Gloria had a great laugh - not so much for how it sounded, which is the usual note of praise - but for the way the brightness of her lipstick and the whiteness of her teeth would suddenly set each other off when she really let go. Her lipstick was always fascinating to me. Sure, there was the typical drawer-of-wonder that most daughters root around in at one time or another but, for me, it was not so much the lipstick itself, but the residue of it all over the house that I remember. Somehow those crisp white cigarettes in the ashtray with their perfect ring of pink, the sherry glass on her little side table with its innocent half moon of red, and the tissue blotters in the waste basket speaking a series of silent "O's" are what I remember about her particular brand of 50's-bred sophistication.

One of her laughs that I best remember was the very first time we went to Montreal as kids. As a 'warm up' for things Canadian, we'd been to Campobello the summer before (my parents were ardent democrats and big FDR and Eleanor fans), but now we were ready for the real thing. For my sister and me, the city was but part of the excitement - it was the hotel room that was the main attraction. Although I don't remember a pool, I'm sure that was requisite hardware if we had any say in the matter.

So, there we were, released after the "bing" of the elevator's opening doors, tromping down the corridors of anticipation madly searching for the lottery ticket that would be our door number. There it was at the end. An end room, a corner suite, to be exact. My parents had obviously treated this one like a proper holiday...

Fling open door, drop bags on floor, place feet in launching position and mount body into air.

The beds were declared to have the perfect bounce factor for continued (I mean potentially all night long) trampoline usage. My parents muttered something about the other guests and my father went in to use the bathroom. Gloria, doing what mothers always do when they enter hotel rooms, went over to the windows and dramatically cast back the polyester curtains to let the light shine onto the wall-to-wall carpet. I can see why scenes like that are always written into movies that involve walking into hotel rooms (for sex, for escape, for an argument that couldn't happen in the lobby) - it is admittedly symbolic in a kind of predictable way. But what wasn't predictable in this case was the parting curtain's effect on my mother's face: her sudden expression of disbelief was followed by a belly laugh the likes of which we never knew she was capable. Head tilted back, lipstick and teeth shining (okay, I'm being dramatic, but I saw this as a kid so let me have my way with it), mom obviously thought something was hilarious out that window.

We rushed over and followed the direction of her original gaze. My father had exited the bathroom by this time and, with the sound of a flushing toilet as an accompaniment to my mother's staccato giggles, he said: "Gloria, what is it?" We didn't feel so badly once we saw that dad had no clue what we were supposed to be looking at either. We all looked again. Nothing but some derelict and graffitied buildings, a bunch of hotel dumpsters filled with what looked like lettuce, and a couple of cars rolling by. Not a person in sight.

"Semper ubi sub ubi" was all my mother could utter before she went to get a glass of water and put down dad's toilet seat.

"What?" we all chimed - "subbubbi what?"

"It's Latin." She snorted. "Look. On the wall over there. Someone graffitied Latin on the side of that building: semper ubi sub ubi." Getting her more scholarly Vergil voice on, Glo explained, "Directly translated it says 'always (semper) where (ubi) under (sub) where (ubi)."

Then she started laughing again. And so did we. We knew we had come to the right city.

Most people would think it was silly (actually most people couldn't even read that damn thing), but dad took some pictures of the Latin phrase at mom's request. It's strange, though; my sister and I have never found those photos in all the times we've had to go through our parents' stuff. Maybe mom took them to the university where she used to teach Classics and pinned them onto her office door or something. When she moved out, they probably got trashed alongside all the ancient coloured doillies and pictures of horses and trolls we'd made her and that was it. It's too bad because those photos represent one of my first memories of Montreal, too. Even though it would be bittersweet now to see mom's graffiti, I'd still like to.

So maybe that's what I'll do when I get back to Montreal next week. Even though I know the words won't still be there, I might just be able to find my own little bit of residue somewhere else in the city.

Gloria Duclos, mother and Classicist, died eight years ago next month.