I ended up with a thin sheaf of snapshots in search of an album and a distended white wicker basket full of junky dime store frames to throw out.
One of the pictures was backed with a quite good pen drawing of a crow clutching a pair of scissors. Another bird added to the flock surrounding our baby, a scavenger with a blade, one to keep an eye on.
The wife called ahead and asked if there was anything she needed. We stopped on the way for her Egg McMuffin.
Needle in the Hay came on when we hit the edge of town and the last note sounded as we parked in front of her house.
Another face from the past I don't remember had flown in from Canada.
"It's been so long since I've seen you!"
"Mmmmm."
There were pictures of their last visit, acres of snow and people I didn't recognize and two snapshots of a huge black wolf walking down the side of the road that at first they'd mistaken for a dog.
She asked me to get the will from her bedroom
I didn't find it because it wasn't there, but I saw the same brandy bottle full of unspent pennies, the same gargantuan jug of that perfume she never wore and the same matched set of combs and brushes that never touched her hair.
The same poster on the wall, a stylized gamine dangling a pair of shears from one crooked pinkie, out of its element and badly faded from hanging near a window.
The same props for the same show she's been starring in my whole life.
Postscript
Leaving we passed another of my mom's old friends pulling in.
She'd earned my enmity by periodically harassing the wife at work, peddling her opinion that the wife only knew half the story, and wasn't I awful for not speaking to my own mother and she really needed to give my mom a chance. The one who hauled her misconceptions into my work and waved them at me like a matador's red cape.
In keeping with the tenor of the times here's her theme song, courtesy of Mr. Smith.
you say you mean well, you don't know what you mean
fucking ought to stay the hell away from things you know nothing about
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