The house no longer smells of Mum. I am almost tempted to spray some eau de cologne just to recall her odour, but that wouldn't work as she stopped using it after my childhood was finished. It is a little musty, but not too bad. My desk is in the room of my mother's last bed. She changed bedrooms a couple of years ago when illness and frailty and the threat of death forced her from her comfy, large Queen bed in the front room into a whizz-bang, bells and whistles hospital bed in the second, smaller bedroom. My desk now sits beside this bed, her last place of sleep and rest. My work place.
It is quiet here, it is night. The little dog next door lets off a half-hearted yap, feeling obliged but unable to summon any real energy. I like it here when the village stills. I feel her near. The window is covered with the lace curtains I chose for her, the floor with the carpet we both liked. I built this house for her, when age and failing health forced her to leave her home of fifty two years. But I built this house to echo the home of her love, of family. I built it to be HOME. And home it was for six wonderful years. Six too short years.
This was meant to be about me, but somehow it is also about her. For without her, there is no me, and at times I feel the me left is nothing but a shadow without her. My Mum. Wise Woman, matriach, nurturer, lender of strength.
I am stopping now for the tears have dissolved the screen. I miss her. Some days unbearably so.
