Saturday 18 June 2005
8:37 a.m.

Next door to the theatre studio in the Rotary Arts Centre are artists' studios. The one I frequented while Everett was in his drama explorations class has handmade beads and jewellery, clothing, and quilts. The hanging above is on the wall outside the shop. Simple; even I could do it.

Mom has been in my dreams for several nights. I am happy to say they were not the kind of dreams where you are overjoyed to see your "dead" relative and then wake up to find it's only a dream and are devastated. No, she is just there, part of it all ... very normal. In one, I noticed I had picked up one of her hand mannerisms and was pleased to be carrying that forward; in another she was being pushed in a wheelchair (as she was at times, in life) and looked dear and sweet, though frail, and I realized another year of life would not have been kind to her; in another, she was admiring bunches of long-stemmed dried roses I'd saved, and wondering what I would do with them.

I immediately think of Mom upon awakening. Not with longing or sorrow, but either remembering something, or wondering where she is and what she is doing. There are moments when the air — or pockets of it — seem charged, as if there is a swirl of light or energy that blinks into my awareness and is gone again. It does not look like Mom; it does not look like anything, and I tell myself I am "seeing things" because I want Mom to make an appearance so that I will know she is all right and not just gone.