Notes from my mother's house

The bag
Outside my mother’s house is a maple tree. Already last autumn, a plastic bag has got stuck in its branches, tight – whoever threw the bag couldn’t have done that if they’d tried. Not only does it look ugly, eye-sorish, it also flaps annoyingly in the wind, right outside my mother’s bedroom window (although now, when the leaves are on the trees, less so – they seem to muffle the sound). My mother says there’s nothing for it, we’ll just have to live with it until it disintegrates.

(I showed the children I teach how to make maple-seed noses. They loved it.)

The rain that came with the day before yesterday’s thunderstorm has half-filled the bag. My mother will have to wait a while, I think.

The grubs
There are worms in my mother’s kitchen cupboards – it is disgusting. And saddening, because it shows how her eyesight is going – this would never have happened before. (Well – not worms, really – rather grubs of some sort, ready to develop into some bug or another that will feed on her bags of flour and other food stocks.)

There are grubs in my mother’s kitchen, she can’t see them, she doesn’t notice because her eyesight is going. There are grubs, and it feels analogous to her life, when I think about it – the grubs, eating my mother’s food stocks, nesting in her pots and containers. And I am just too tired, and - maybe - lazy too, to start the gigantic clean-up operation of de-grubbing the kitchen (the heart of the home).

The clock
My mother’s wall clock has a temper on it. It gets offended if you wind it too early, or too late, or too much, or too little, and stops. You are then compelled to give its pendulum a push, every five minutes, to tempt it into going again. (She has inflicted this, originally her own compulsion, upon me too. No doubt soon I’ll start feeling superstitious about it too, like she does.) You feel you absolutely must get it to work again, to go again, to tick again, even if - like me - you can’t actually bear a ticking wall clock (although I like it in watches). It carries a strange potential for gratification, as you can never tell when the whimsical bugger will start again – indeed, whether it ever shall. Sometimes it will surprise you with the pleasure of starting again after only three nudges; at other times, it will start only when, hoping against hope on the third day, you give it yet another shove. Usually I don’t even notice it has started until much later, and to a very specific delight: it is ticking again.