This one-minute prose poem is from the 🌿Leaves archive of 9/23. You may remember it. It is as true today as it was then.
Winter Sun
I curl up on my mother’s white bed. The west window is open and the white gauze curtains breathe in and out with the late afternoon breeze from off the harbor. The low winter sun pours thinly into the room, reflecting on the white walls and white blanket as if on snow. It warms my shoulders, my back. The room is quiet, I hear only the lightly muffled traffic out on the avenue, a dog barking somewhere in the distance. I bunch up the pillow under my head and sleep.
My mother’s been gone now, for more than eight years. I am learning to live with the loss, but still, I come to this room in the afternoon to rest. I see her sitting there in the cane-back rocker, wearing the ragged red sweater that she will not throw away.
It’s still my mother’s bed, my mother’s room, kept ready and waiting, on the faint possibility she might find her way back.
It sounds to me that your mother is back, and that she lives through you.
Two very lonely posts this morning, Sharron. Lovely and melancholy. That lonesome void when someone is gone forever is a slow eroding burn in the heart. But it's nice when the burn is from love and not from unhealed wounds.