Sometimes hearing her laugh is the only thing that lets me know life goes on.

No matter if it's the slow, sarcastic chuckle or a giggling eye-winker that shapes my own laugh, my mother finds reason to laugh in darkest and most hopeful times.

Kathy Isaac knows only to laugh and recite two phrases to me and my sister, "It's always something," and "Trouble don't last always."

She told me there was a cold, light rain on Wednesday, Jan. 12, 1977, when I was born.

My woeful father was not at the Henderson hospital. I first met him at age 14 at his father's funeral.

From fiberglass manufacturing to frying chicken to cleaning motels to cleaning houses, my mother worked two jobs nearly all of my life.

She taught me how to read. And now, she still tells anyone who will listen of how I could recite the alphabet at 2, understand a clock at 4 and read on a fourth-grade level at 6.

I usually lower my face in slight embarrassment, hoping that my mother will take a break from the "championing her kids" moment. But the smile on her face is unmistakable, and she can't say any of those stories without a laugh, it seems.

I listen for it. I wait for it, and I live for it. Mama's laughter takes me to times when she and neighbors sat together on porches in Tatum enjoying cool evenings.

There was so much to be downtrodden about, and Mama will get down sometimes. It's the laugh, the smile, the tenderness that shapes who I am, and who my sister, Kambry, is, and how we have survived poverty.

Jimmy Isaac is a News-Journal reporter. E-mail: jisaac@longview-news.com.