Unfinished conversations

Today is my mum's birthday.  She died in 2014, and with her went many important bits of the scaffolding of my life to that point.  You could always rely on her and my dad, for kindness and support and quite a lot of laughs (when together, they were the most inveterate gigglers).  What I miss most though, are the fairly inconsequential conversations we had when she was old and living out the difficult years after my dad had gone.  Even now there are many things I want to ask or tell her.

So, with the house to myself and a quiet day I put together this blip of her: the photo that sat by my bedside all through my years at a small (and increasingly dysfunctional) boarding school, and two of the many many letters she wrote me - on the left when I was working in London and had just begun my own photography commissions, and on the right one written about four years before when I was living in Melbourne.  Also in the blip is a little - very battered - Battersea box she had as a young woman and eventually gave to me.  I think there's even a photo of me somewhere, aged about 2, holding it and looking gormless as always  :))

How lovely I still have so much of what she wrote to me.

Have a happy evening, peeps  xx