I’d only recently come to know Marie, having met her on one of my nightly strolls through the small town and taken an immediate shine to her. Her innocent smile and playful eyes attracted my attentions and soon we were steady friends and never seen apart. As part of the many and varied courting obligations I was to go with her family and attend her grandfathers large mansion on a remote country road for mothers day, a long and mostly silent drive through thin forest and sprawling properties covering hectares and long, long driveways.
When I say "mansion" I don’t mean the “lightning bolts strike across a dark sky-two story with turrets like eyes” variety, I mean a sprawling single level country home with way too many bedrooms, Holden memorabilia in its own room of glory, two kitchens and three car garage type of mansion. No live stock, just open fields and rusting cars that her brothers and other cousins had left there where they'd failed to start. The house was now only her grandfathers, her grandmother having died some years ago, but it was a steadfast tradition that they attended the house to honour her in the evening of mothers day.
Each year they would each bring her presents and place them under a picture of her. The way Marie had described it to me prior had given it an all together dignified air, but the actual witnessing of it left me squeamish, the way they announced what was contained in the small wrapped packages and what she would have used it for left me feeling chilled to the bone. “It’s a jumper, a woollen one that I’ve knitted.” her aunt Freya announced. “She would sit at the window and wear it while she counted her beads” and I morbidly pictured them, working as a family and digging up the corpse to sit her at a window wearing her new jumper.
Making my apologies, I excused myself from the scene to go to the bathroom, following the “third door on the left down the left hall” directions precisely I found myself in a small room piled high with still wrapped gifts and a small table. The pictures on the table showed the family gathered standing around the photo of the deceased grandmother holding the pictures from previous years, and I could match some of the boxes in the picture to the boxes in the room. There was the large red one from a photo of a much younger version of Marie around age 5 with her bright playful eyes, and the round yellow one from a more recent photo of Aunt Freya. “It’s a basketball. She would sit at the window while she bounced it” I could hear her saying in my head.
Now as I turn to leave the room, I see on the wall next to the door a picture of the dearly departed grandmother, looking sick with the illness that took her of her life, her features almost racing ahead of her and taking on a slightly decayed look, like she’d already died. Maria looks positively vibrant next to her in the picture, here in her late teens with those bright, beautiful playful eyes…there’s a shuffle behind me, from a space past the boxes and there are footsteps at the door. I hear Marie’s voice from behind the door. “It’s a boy. She will consume him and live another year sitting at the window. Happy mothers day Grandmother.”
