I talked w/ Dad earlier this evening, and he said he found an old, wallet-size picture of Mom on the floor in the basement near the treadmill. He has no idea how it got there or where it came from. His first instinct is that someone was in the house so he's taken to locking the doors each time he leaves; a task normally reserved for bedtime and overnight trips. My first instinct when he told me about it was that Mom's spirit was in the house and placed it there for a reason. I don't even know if Dad believes in ghosts so I didn't verbalize these thoughts. We chalked it up as a "mystery" and left it at that.....at least I did for now.
Walking the dog tonight I encountered another mystery.......where did all the snow go in an apparently speedy fashion? It seems like just last week I was still walking the dog down the sidewalk through tunnels of snow, yet even now my memory of all that snow is fading. I have to really search my memory to recall that the snow was a high as the side tables on the swing that sets on the cement slab in the middle of the lawn. I'm afraid my memory of Mom will be as fleeting, and that each day I'll have to work harder and search deeper to recall that she came up to my shoulders, and her kneecaps were knobby from years of mopping on her knees, and her right index finger (or was it her left) had two little bumps on it that she used to put ink dots on so they looked like boobies, and how her hair used to be black like Liz Taylor's until she stopped dying it and then it was a beautiful silver. I can't let her melt away, forgetting how she would gently call my name from the bottom of the stairway to wake me for school and church, even years after I'd grown and moved away and returned home for weekends. Mysteries are meant to be solved, memories to be sustained, and hard work is required for both.
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