Reminding

Lately I have come to notice that the inner monologue that runs in my head is my Mothers voice.

 As I hastily mop the fluff and coal dust from one side of the living room to the other - wet of head and wearing my coat to run out the door - I hear her say – “Give it a lick and a promise, Michelle.”

When I am washing up my solitary plate and glass, a single fork,   I hear her say “Dry them out of it”.

If a knife falls on the floor I hear her say “Oh, here’s a visitor”.

All day long the old words return, or maybe just re-appear. They have not been far.

Some have been sunning themselves like lizards on rocks - some have been hiding underneath them. They awake now like sleepers and coil their sluggish drowsy selves around me so that I am encircled and consumed  by them. These words of memory   rupture like fragile soap bubbles all around me and inspire the story behind the words, which leads to the words becoming something other than the sum of their parts.  

“She’s a real “Mary Hick “in that get up.”

If she could only see me in the fur coat with hood I bought for one euro yesterday.

“I can’t find a thing in this ship of a house” flung over a muffled shoulder from the depths of the coat press under the stairs.

“Would you be interested in this?” as she tried to buy me clothing/crockery/books.

“Oh, he’s on the usual aul Cant, I see” about a politician on the evening news.

“You’d give last to nobody” when I came reeling in the door at stupid o clock from some outrageous affair. And her stoic, silent presence outside the bathroom door (when she heard me sobbing loudly in the shower after the premature ending of yet another  doomed love affair ) -  observing only “What’s for you won’t pass you”.

For a woman who was reared to be as cool as the proverbial cucumber  -  quiet , refined, softly spoken  and curse free, it must have been a baptism of fire to produce a daughter who screamed her way into the world early and immediately began behaving as if she was  a minor deity with the temperament of a hysterical Italian housewife - think Sophia Loren having a tantrum  topped off with Cleopatra in a strop, and  Marilyn Monroe having a breakdown – all wrapped up in a precocious tiny child.

“She’s no bigger than a Gods cow”“That one is knee high to a daisy” said as she took up another 4” on my white dress the night before my communion.  I still remember the smell of coffee and cigars in The Talbot Hotel, where we went for  Holy Communion  dinner.  In my excitement , and with my white purse stuffed and  bulging with notes, I stood on tippytoes to shout up to the woman behind the glass display case which was filled with Waterford Glass, Belleek  china, and Newbridge Cutlery –“How much is the bottle of Jemmy? It’s for my Dad.” She has always been patient and methodical, unassuming, gentle, loyal, a keeper of secrets, reliable, punctual, and content in the essence of herself. The Gods must have laughed long and hard to send her a baby that was the complete antithesis of all of the above and then some. She wraps her words of love around me, and reminds me of my life.