May 7, 2021
When I called my 88-year-old mother yesterday she didn’t have time to talk. She’d just returned from shopping and coffee with her friend Claire and was putting away groceries. The two of them had gone halves in a cauliflower.
‘I can’t eat a whole cauli these days.’
I asked Marion if they were going to have a drink after putting away the groceries. They hadn’t decided yet, she replied.
This morning I asked what she and Claire had decided the previous day. ‘Beer,’ she replied. But when I’d spoken to her the previous day it was only 2 o’clock in the afternoon. ‘When are you going to act your age, Mum?’ She laughed in her wild way. ‘I am acting my age. This is how you go on.’ She then told me she’d been talking to her sister, my Aunt Joy, who turns 90 in October. Mum had asked Joy if she was still smoking. Joy replied, ‘Of course. It’s the only thing that keeps me going.’