Hi Mum, Took me a heartbeat to choose the background colour for your candle! It had to be blue and just the right colour to match your eyes. I was sat in my garden office concentrating on creating our new website when I realised that the birdsong outside had changed from the mundane winter trill to a celebration of the coming of spring. With everything that is going on in the world, from the fallout of the Pandemic to teetering on the brink of a new world order, what joy and calm the sound of nature brings us. Then after joy, comes sadness and a deep longing for a time that now exists only in our memories and dreams. Of you, Dad, Tessy and us two children. Toes, fingers, noses and knees cold and wet as we waded through fields of winter grass and hidden briers. Hands covered in pollen as we reached up to grasp branches of fluffy pussy willow and catkins to take home for Granny. Tessy startling ducks, moorhens and scurrying water voles as she launched herself off the riverbank into the water in pursuit of a trail of bubbles. Nose down snuffling the pebbly depths, the bubbles one moment in front of her and then the next floating swiftly away. Out she would clamber, her heavy coat of yellow fur weighed down with water and pond weed and we would all run for cover! Quick, quick! Alas our legs were far to short to run the distance needed before she shook herself with such vigour that we became as wet as her. Now it was time to retrace our steps, head for home, for warmth and toasting toes on radiators. The itchiness of thawing hands and feet, made better by hot milk and sugar and a special chocolate biscuit from the out of reach tin on the top shelf in the pantry. This precious heirloom, this slightly rusty tin, passed down through the family forever tainted its contents with the taste of christmas. Generations had used it to store and mature the annual christmas cake. There it would slumber for three months in the darkness of the pantry, safe in it's tin shelter. Slowly soaking up a weekly tipple of spirits, quitely waiting for its all too brief but triumphant release in to the kitchen to be decorated and then set aside on the sideboard waiting for the big day. Outside of the seasonal offering, the tin held special biscuits, for adults only. These were covered in thick, almost impenetrable chocolate and some were wrapped in pretty coloured foil, the colours denoting their taste. Green for mint, orange for orange, red for strawberry and so on. To be given one of these was a perfect treat, a distraction from the itchy irritation of warming extremities.
Such happy memories that at the time seemed so inconsequential. Perhaps when we feel at our happiest we imprint the moment in our memories without realising. There are so many random triggers to my happy memories with you. A smell, a sound, a touch, something I see. There are so many that they have filled the expanse of time since you left us and I find myself startled and shocked at how many years have slipped by. Surely it was only yesterday. I can still hear you and feel the softness of your cheek on mine. I can hear your voice in my head calling me to dinner.
So today another trigger, the sound of spring bird song, hastened me to your site to tell you how much I love you Mum. Of course I miss you, but you gave us children so many memory triggers throughout our lives and you never stopped telling us how deeply and desperately you loved us, that we feel you have never left. I love you Mum and here is your candle for today!