Home – to bushels of yellow leaves littering my new front walk and my own lengthy List of Things to Do. But the crabby cat actually, perhaps, allowed a momentary flicker of affection in those green eyes. So you’re back, she says. About @#$# time.
As my mother grows more frail and vulnerable, our bond grows stronger, to something primal – she is my mother, she is in need, I must help. There is a huge love. Hard even to write about. It meant a lot, this year, that we watched the Remembrance Day events together, the camera panning past the elderly faces of the veterans, and I sitting beside one, my mother, veteran of the British Land Army, then a code cracker at Bletchley Park. What stories she tells – thousands of people working there, cracking German submarine codes on the Enigma Machine, yet the place was top secret for years.
We salute and thank you, veterans. Like heroes in the Greek legends, you saved the world from a monster.
We took special note of that minute, eleven minutes past eleven, or 11:11/11/11/11. “Next year,” I said, “I’ll come for December 12 and we’ll celebrate 12:12/12/12/12.” Let’s, Mum, okay?
Next year, she will be a great-grandmother. We’re all rolling along on the conveyor belt of life. Celebrating the too-fast, never easy, ever-changing ride, as we head for the edge.
