RECENTLY I heard a woman talking on the radio about her mother.

The subject was motherless daughters. I cocked an ear.

Only the night before I had been at a function where, amid the social buzz, I came across a friend looking just a little forlorn.

She was fingering the pearls around her neck.

"They were Mum's," she said.

Her mum had died just some months before and since then Heather has days when she feels like she just wants her Mum.

Do we ever get over this?

I wonder how often my own mother sometimes must have just wanted her mum as she went about mothering 14 children of her own.

I'm lucky to have her still.

Mum nursed her mother through her final years when we kids were around her feet.

She says that often, especially as she ages, she appreciates more what her mother did for her.

An overheard conversation on a train recently yielded this pearl: "Your mother is the only person in your life you know loves you unconditionally."

That's if you get lucky of course.

There are some whose mothers are absent or don't nurture and care for them.

I am lucky.

Perhaps this is what struck me most when I visited the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney recently for the first time to see a painting that I have adopted as my talisman of great fortune in the mother stakes.

The painting is called The Sea Hath Its Pearls.

It features a woman on a beach, garbed in a diaphanous dress with sandals, reminiscent of ancient times, examining a shell in her hand.

Waves are lapping gently just beyond her feet.

Painted in 1897, its golden frame features tiny crabs.

In the history of art, the work itself is probably unremarkable, even voyeuristic, though it speaks an appreciation of beauty and life.

But it earned significance for me because a print of it adorned the wall of my grandmother's and then my mother's home.

I wondered what it meant to my grandmother who was born two years after William Margetson created it.

Was it merely fashionable to have such a print at the time or did Nan appreciate beauty?

Perhaps the subject's absorption in the detail of life enchanted Nan?

I like to think that the beach in the painting, far from the flat inlands of Tongala and Kyabram where she lived, offered Nan dreamy relief when she needed it, that it spoke of a world of beauty.

Mum fastened it to the hallway wall at our home after Nan died and now it is as a much treasured feature in my own home.

It offers a link to my mother and my grandmother.

Mum didn't ever discuss with Nan why she liked the image so much.

There are other things too she wishes she'd asked her.

One day when I begged Mum for more details about her mother's life, she responded with this.

"Enfold your mother while you have her and speak with her about her time and her life."