Friday 25th January

Snow is circling against the dark trees. Flakes are blown sideways, and  spin in the air like ashes from a fire.

Thursday 24th January

I have an appointment in an upstairs office.  The institution winks, sidelong, knowing, and beckons me in.

Wednesday 23rd January

I am a person who knows where things are.  Today I have lost something and it is as if the world has cracked into pieces.

Tuesday 22nd January

Pat wonders if she will drive a car again.  She dreams of visits on a whim, a trip out, surprising somebody.  But then remembers the checking of tyres and fuels and fluids, the insurance, the tests and the money.  All the things her dead husband once enjoyed.

Monday 21st January

Emily is two feet long and jiggles and juggles and wobbles and burbles.  Her little body is warm and pulsing.  Any moment, she might spring like a panther into her life.

Sunday 20th January

After the funeral, your house has new sounds.   Pans in the kitchen, boxes and bedding moved, and the high, Italian chatter of your granddaughters.  They catch two mice who once shared your living room quietness, skittering across the boards.  Where else to free them now but the cemetery, with its new grave, flowers fluttering, anchored between earth and sky?

Saturday 19th January

We suggest oil for the sign that has swung and screeched all the windy night, stopping her sleep, and shivering the back of her neck.  The sound was a sort of sawing, she says, or something on the street.  A ladder, and the dab of a rag might fix it.  But at least I know what it is, she says, and maybe I’d miss it if it was gone.