Tuesdays With Mum

I have a weekly date with Mum.

We spend Tuesdays together.

For a while, I brought the kids up to her place and we would spend the day harassing her cat and generally invading her home so that Someone could have a quiet day.  For the last few months, however, he's been keeping the kids at home and giving Mum and I a day to do whatever it is we do without the kids around.

Thank you, Someone, for a day to breathe!

Mostly, we talk.  We do things while we talk - knit, crochet, visit her local yarn shop, attend quilt guild, run errands - but always, we talk.

We talk about the past, the present, what we think the future holds.  We tell out stories a few hours at a time, hers, mine, the tales of the people we know.  We gossip and laugh and get serious.

I would love to say we are secretly international jewel thieves or rock stars, or that we don costumes and fight crime with slick moves and pithy catch phrases, but...nah.

Sometimes we go somewhere, do something.  Almost always, Mum buys me lunch.

I love these Tuesdays with Mum.  I think of it as banking memories against the inevitable days when I will want to have such a savings, when there will be nothing more to deposit and I will want something to help fill what will be a tremendous void.

Don't get me wrong, we're not exactly ordering sackcloth yet...although Mum DID have a conversation with a cremation society last week, which I would have loved to have heard because we both have something of an irreverence regarding death.  It's just that we both know no one lives forever.  No one.

So while we're living, we're making sure we sift through the sands of time for whatever shining gems we can find, polish them up, and set them in the crown of memory.