By the time you read this, I'll have started the work of clearing his house, after her family have travelled over it and through it like a biblical plague of starving locusts, I've no doubt.
Such is the path of life, non?... Such is the path of grief, as some of you wise people leaving wise words have had the sense, and I'd guess the experiences yourselves, to remark upon...
I thank you for your wisdom, your helpful words, and your kindnesses shown to me. Bless you.
And yet I sometimes fear that history repeats itself, does it not?
I know there are things there that belonged to him.
There are trinkets and treasures I recall that belonged to my mother.
That belong to me.
That I hope are still there...
I don't know yet what we will do with the old house... The house that nobody has ever lived in since new but my family, because they are still my family. I don't feel up to selling it just now, and it's not really a very healthy sales market at present, but I don't necessarily want to leave it empty and vulnerable - To attack or to crime...
I would like my dad's tools, that he handled and cherished.
He used to fix things for me with those tools.
Things that now remain unmended tell his story...
There's an old hand-drill with a red handle that belonged to my maternal great-grandfather, who might have brought it back from America... Maybe in the Twenties, or before that... I think it's marked 'USA...'
My dad and I found a record of him entering Ellis Island... We really don't know what happened next, but I don't believe we still have any relatives in the US. (Unless you know otherwise, mes bloggy buddies Over The Pond?! Fingers crossed, eh?)
I would like to hold the cheap china unicorn that was one of the last presents that I gave my mother. ...She loved it.
I want their photographs and memories back - Home and Away, black and white pictures and happiness of here and abroad. Me as a baby, held on a varicosity of knees.
Me, the wan podgy toddler, standing feisty and proud, hands on hips, on an upturned boat at the beach in the village where my maternal grandparents lived -- The north sea breeze blowing on, and me with a sharp blonde bob. Some things never change!
There's me as a blushing bride in a romantic knee-length white lace dress that my dad helped me to choose, the week before the wedding; Twenty pound notes pressed frantically into his hands by my mother, impatient for me to,
'Choose something decent, and do not let me down!".
Here, I'm holding on to a white straw boater in July's bitter north-easterly wind - I'd bought that hat with its white streaming ribbons on a break at our friend's in Suffolk the previous spring, long before I'd even found THE dress. ...Well, it was the Eighties, and ever the Fashion Victim, there's me holding THAT short white wedding dress down against my knees and the breezes too!
I'm looking forward to seeing the treasured brief moments of my mother and father as fierce, proud grandparents to Grizz, whom they lovingly called "The Boy"...
My Mutti didn't see Grizz's fifth birthday... She would have loved him to bits. She wanted 'to eat him up for breakfast', she loved him with all of her battered heart...
I'd like their love letters, full of imaginings and Fifties' British and American movies -- Love at long distance while my dad was stationed away from home in the RAF.
These, I know, were secreted away, secured with white ribbon and surreptitiously slipped in amongst their wedding memorabilia and those Welcome Baby, and Baby's 1st Birthday cards that celebrated the arrival of me into their lives - I remember baby pink cards and silver horseshoes and, now-silent, bells in paper and card, all stashed safely away when my mum was 17 and my dad 21.
I had come along to spoil their happiness, do you see, to be the apple of my dad's eye, around twelve years later. ...Conceived in a foreign land that I'll never visit, it's just too dangerous. That was the first time she'd ever flown in a 'plane, of course, a ramshackle one at that...
I'd like to see their photo slides. Men in beige uniform standing to attention, and sometimes relaxing in the scorching hot climate, nervously scanning the dusty ground for scorpions at their feet...
I understand you can have slides made into DVDs these days... I'd like to do that. To resurrect their memories. Their lives.
Young Love.
Love's Young Dream.
As I tippy-tappy here, I don't know if any of this is still there in the house... My childhood home from the age of 8 hasn't received any heat (or probably electricity so I'm taking a torch!) over the coldest, dampest winter we've had in over forty years...
I hope that none of this has been lost to the elements, to foxing and fogging, to lack of heat and to damp... I hope I can save what I'd like to save.
For prosperity. For me. It's all I have left of them...
It feels like it's all I have left of me...
And I don't know what I'll be encountering... But I'm floundering, an adult foundling...
And I feel for their loss as a family... But I'm still holding on to mine.
It's very much my loss...
And I'm not afraid to admit that I'm scared.
Art, as before, by Ann-Julie Aubry - "I've Been Waiting For You" - I want to buy some of those prints, to secure my own artistic legacy for my child, and my future grand-children, perhaps...
