lemon loves …

My dear Mother in Law died in August. She was 85. She lived a good life, and we celebrated the kindness and joy she bought into the world at her funeral.

Since then we have been adjusting to life without her, and have been going through the legal and practical processes which the ending of a life bring about.

And as time passes it seems to me that we are not living without her at all, for she is with us in our conversations, in the language we use, the words we choose to say in the way she used to say them, because it keeps her with us. She is with us in the way we see the world around us, when we notice what she would have noticed, comment on the things which she would have bought to our attention, laugh at the comments she would have made were she here.

She is with us too in the things which we are choosing to hold on to, things which we would not have chosen to live with, until she were no longer here to live with them herself, things she chose, valued, enjoyed. Things which hold the essence of a life lived, of memory, history and story.

And whilst I love this print of wild ducks flying over water, into a wide pale sky …

… it is this detail of an original watercolour, painted in a nearby village by a local neighbour, which I love most of all … for this fisherman, sitting peacefully on the riverbank is said to be my husband’s Father, captured in paint, and presented as a gift by the painter … and so it may be, that he was there on the day the painting was made in 1962. It is a story, for we do not know, but it is also a part of a family’s history, and what is history, but a collection of stories, myths and interpretations.

And it is in the stories we know about her life, the stories she shared with us, and those shared by others, the stories which we in turn are sharing, enjoying and learning from that she continues to be with us, and so she will be. As will this fisherman be, as his story is told and re-told, and in time, passed on to the next generation.