My mother called me three times that week. Not about logistics — about feelings.
The first call was about the kitchen cabinets, specifically the ones she’d had installed in 2008 when she and my father had done the kitchen renovation. She described each cabinet in more detail than I’d known she remembered: the pull handles, the soft-close hinges that my father had spent an entire Saturday adjusting to get right, the drawer where she’d always put the good dish towels. ‘I know they stay with the house,’ she said. ‘I know that. I just wanted to tell someone.’
I listened. This was a thing I could do without cost to either of us — be the person she told the kitchen cabinets to. She had been in that house for twenty-eight years. The appropriate response to twenty-eight years of a life in a place is not a brisk reminder that she’d chosen to sell it.
The second call was about the backyard. Specifically, a climbing rose she’d planted along the back fence the summer I was nine years old. She had no memory of what had prompted her to plant it — ‘I must have seen one somewhere and thought it would be nice’ — but she’d tended it for twenty-seven years and it had gotten enormous. She was not going to be able to take it.
‘The new owners have kids,’ she said. ‘I hope they leave it.’
‘It’s a very good climbing rose,’ I said.
‘It is,’ she said. ‘It really is.’