You know, it’s not often that I get the chance to sit down and write two blog posts in one day these days. Gone are the heady (for which read ‘crappy’) days of full-time PhD study, when blog posts felt almost like work because they included the writing of words, albeit words which were completely unrelated to anything I should have been writing about, and in their place are days of almost frenetic activity, of organised chaos, of places and times and movement and change and learning and teaching and… so on. The coin has two sides: one side is that Quercus and I manage not to use a nursery for the witchling, and can look after her ourselves, which is what we always wanted to do if we had children, but the other side of that is that we seem always to be en route. En route to work, en route home, en route to pick up groceries, en route to do, do, do. We have three-quarters of an hour between my leaving work and Quercus arriving at his desk, and a twenty-five mile commute split between the two of us; it’s tight, to say the least. BUT – and this is a big but – it’s working, I think, and we are settling into a new pattern, and I’m so very glad that when I leave in the morning, it’s Quercus who is holding the witchling as she looks a little uncertain about my departure, and Quercus who jollies her along with a wooden spoon and a quick waltz around the kitchen, and Quercus who gives her expressed breast-milk mid-morning before her snooze, which she takes in her own cot, surrounded by her own things, in her own house.

Anyhoo.

For some reason, I’m feeling introspective. Perhaps it’s an impending paternal visit. Or perhaps it’s the making of wine, which always reminds me of my mother and of my father, who first taught me such delights. And with introspection comes memory, and, often, thoughts of my mother. What would she make of my life now? Of our life here, all three of us, together in our tiny and slightly chaotic house? Of the new extension? Of the red paint? Of the fact that the house speaks of her in the things it houses, of her influence on my life, of my love for her, of the life I lived, the person I was, when she was last on this earth? I hope – I think – she would be happy. She would be pleased. She would be proud.

And that makes me think of the time when she was last on this earth. My twenty-second birthday preceded her death by a matter of days; I remember knowing that she was going to die long before the doctors confirmed it to us. I could see it in her; one simply couldn’t look like that, and be going to make old bones. I tried to hide my knowledge, and I hope I did; I know that we didn’t speak of what was coming, only of what was, though we did take, simultaneously and spontaneously, to saying we loved each other every time I left the hospice for any length of time.

And after she died, just before Christmas, I muddled my way through the assessments I had to complete in order to stay at university and maintain my grade average. It sounds uncaring, I always think, but I felt that to drop out would be upsetting to her – she had to leave university after she fractured her skull in a road accident at nineteen, and she never made it back, a fact which always pissed her off. She would have felt responsible for my failure. So I stayed, just barely, and a few weeks later, I went back for the start of term. Back to normality, in some ways, though in a world so altered that even the colour of the sky seemed wrong to me. And one night, long after Quercus and I had gone to bed, I woke suddenly, certain that someone was standing by the bed. I had an attic room in a Victorian terrace that year; my mother had liked the look of it from the photos I’d shown her, because it had reminded her of the room she herself had lived in during her brief university stint. The room was cave-like, with a dormer window at one end and the bed far back in the darker end of the room; I awoke to find just enough light to make out quite clearly a figure by the bed, one with light hair. That is all I can say with any certainty. I was so shocked that I did the cartoon thing of rubbing at my eyes and blinking to make it go away, to no effect. I reached behind me to wake Quercus, and as I turned back, it was gone. I didn’t see it again, whatever it was, but I never lost a feeling of being watched whenever I was in the house alone.

It’s that old cliché, really, isn’t it? There are more things in heaven and earth, and all that. How I have wished it would happen again, but it never has. I once smelt a scent she used to wear while I was in the car with my father, so strongly that we both got out and tried to find the source of it (to no avail), but I’ve never seen anything which could be connected to her since. It’s left me with a certainty that this isn’t it, though; I’ve always had leanings towards ‘alternative’ thinking on the religious/spirituality front, and I feel very strongly that there is something beyond the normal sphere of human existence, and sometimes one gets a glimpse of that.

So, that’s my moment of introspection for today, folks. See what too much Joni Mitchell will do to you?