In a squalid semi-swamp, Mother, a statuesque crone — she looms immobile on a pedestal that looks a bit like a drippy candle — with an unsteady grip on reality and a penchant for monologue, waxes fantastical about her checkered life story, spooling out anecdotes and pungent neologisms.
The TV ad showed a harassed mother swamped with festive preparations: shopping, cooking, cleaning, writing cards, wrapping presents and making beds.
We want to believe that an outsider can drain the swamp and that a mother of young children, not a child of privilege, can have the guts and integrity to take on the establishment.
When she saw him get swamped, she called her mother and asked her to get something out of the closet.
At the same mo-ment he is "cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of winter which they are bearing off"; at other times he eavesdrops on "the faint wiry peep" of the baby woodcock being led by their mother through the swamp.
There are not one but three monsters: Grendel, a man-eating ogre who snacks nightly on sleeping Danes until Beowulf, the story's hero, sails over from what is now Sweden and rips his arm off; Grendel's mother, a fearsome swamp creature, hell-bent on avenging her creepy son; and a treasure-hoarding dragon, who was the inspiration for some of Tolkien's winged worm-things.
But detecting disorders such as Down syndrome using maternal blood has been tougher because the test has to spot an extra chromosome, and the mother's DNA swamps out the fetus's DNA.
For a while, Laroche's passion was to photograph every single species of orchid in bloom in Florida; he and his mother would trudge through the swamp, carrying cameras, for hours on end.
Ryan hadn't been enormous for an eighteen-year-old, but on his mother his checked lumberjack shirt was swamping, enveloping.
The mother lives in a chamber below a stinking swamp: "The water surged with gore, with blood yet hot".
That's how they met: Dad spotted my mother on a bird-watching tour of the swamp, her beauty magnified by his 10x binoculars.
