Friday, December 30, 2016

Found: Writing ideas? Dreams? Observations?

Today would have been my mother's 77th birthday. Each year on her birthday, I go through her collection of photos or her boxes of things, her writing. I have so many that I will likely never run out of material; she was a writer, after all, and a saver, collector of significant bits and pieces.

Today, I opened a box labeled in her hand "Personal NYer Notes." Among a collection of postcards of New York, art works, newspaper clippings, various things that spoke to her (the postcards are unused, blank), I found these two yellowing pages dated 1972 and numbered 25 and 26. I don't know if they are story ideas, dreams or observations. They are mysterious bits and pieces, "NYer Notes."



I wonder if I will find pages 1-24, or pages 27+ as I keep looking. 

Sending love into the ether for my mum. I am forever grateful she was mine. I do not claim she was perfect, and I was certainly not always a good, dutiful daughter (understatement...), but she was brilliant, quirky, loving, awkward, open-minded, kind, thoughtful. She was beloved by many, missed by them all, and none more than by me. We were quite the pair (single mother, only child), and I will always carry her memory and cherish the bits of her that are a part of me. Love you, mum.

The photos for today? Two from 1940, when she was three months old and her brother Graham (my dear uncle) was three years old.




And one from 2006, in the Sydney, Australia at the Royal Botanic Gardens, with her pixie hair cut, growing back from the chemo of the previous year, taken less than a year before she died. 






1 comment:

  1. Glad you're keeping this going, Caitlin. All the best. I still have my treasured copy of Lies and Stories.

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