#father

Homespun

~ Paula Harmon ~ 12 Comments

“I’ve bought you a loom,” said Dad, fancying self-sufficiency.

Mum was planting potatoes, while his thoughts shuttled off, wondering about getting a pigpen.

Indoors, my mother, tense as warped yarn, wondered how she was could cook with this monstrous machine filling our dark kitchen. Selvedges would run parallel to cupboards while the beam abutted the range and to weave the weft she would have her back to the sink.

One day, the loom was gone.

Despite Scots blood, Mum never wove the tweed suit Dad planned. I think she made a table mat.

He’s lucky it wasn’t a shroud.

weaving

Copyright 2016 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission

Prompted by the word “Yarn” in the Thin Spiral Notebook. (NB this is a true story.)

The Day After

~ Paula Harmon ~ 3 Comments

I don’t think I can remember the day after. Or the day after that. Not really. I think we said goodbye to my sister and I took Mum home with me; all the way along the motorway and then south. Who knows what we talked about. I can’t remember.

So strange to leave you behind, to put off the paperwork and the phone calls for just a few days. I think I just took Mum home for the weekend.

Home to see the husband and children I’d left on Monday thinking I’d be away for two days on a course, not five days by a hospital bed watching lines waver and dip and jump and not really knowing what they meant.

Five days watching you ebb away; knowing you were gone long before Mum realised. Reading the Bible to you; holding hands around you; sitting in the limbo of the intensive care waiting room – families huddled and separate with more or less hope, each unit a lost island of distress in a dry sea of unshed tears.

My sister and I, we knew there was no hope, but Mum hung on till the last day.

So I could tell you exactly what we did every day Dad, right up to the time when we had to leave you and we ate dinner because there was nothing else to do; nothing left to say; no tears left. It was the only thing I could organise.

I can remember that, I can remember lying awake in bed that night – all three of us awake – numb, dreamlike. And I can remember wanting to text you: “I love you, I love you…”. But I can’t remember the day after. I think I took Mum home with me.

I think the day after: I grew up.

hand

Copyright 2016 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission