belle's mouthpiece?

You might be interested in Belle, the person who keeps signing the posts. She was an interesting woman. The story is both long and circuitous and brief and to the point. She and her sisters hated each other. "What did they fight about?" I asked a cousin from South Africa once. "Anything. If one said it was black, the other said it was white. They just fought all the time." And so it was with a pervading sadness that, after my grandmother's funeral, my father implored me and my young brothers to always get along with our siblings. Belle was born one off from the youngest of a large eastern european brood. She wanted, however, to be the youngest. And to that end she insisted her younger brother, Sam, swap birthdays with her. When she died, at age 84 or 86 or 87 (it will never be totally clear), her death certificate gave her year of birth as 1902. But I know she had simply succeeded in fooling her nephew, a rather famous doctor, into thinking that. She was almost certainly born in 1899. Maybe in Poland. Maybe in South Africa. But somewhere, she had a beginning.