~ a strip of decaying rag

I was gardening earlier in the week when I found a piece of old rotten fabric. Here is a picture of it.



I was about to flick it onto a rubbish pile when I was struck by the remnants of gold and pale blue patterning on the cloth.

Now, I have in the past found the odd bit of nostalgic refuse in the yard: antique marbles I would drop into beds of moss just to see the neat hole they made, a sheriff’s badge of primitive white plastic which was unmistakably a relic of my childhood.

But this minging bit of rag, I swiftly realised, was a piece of my parents’ bed. Now, assuming [pretty safely] that my parents never fired up their sex lives with any extra-bedroom antics, this would have been the bed I was conceived on.

Long gone, chopped up and left out with the hard rubbish – but for this little decaying reminder…

I showed it to Jenny.

- there may be a few of your brothers and sisters left on that

After my parents died, I did have a slight problem getting rid of their stuff. [I have a problem getting rid of any stuff] If I had to throw out an article of clothing that held an emotional resonance, I would cut off a little piece and keep it in a memory box. There was a winter coat of my mother’s - brownish with tiny little coloured woollen spots sewn in. During Mass, as a very small child, I would love to pick off those coloured nubs. My mum didn’t like it, of course, but I guess it kept me from squirming … Naturally, there’s a sample of that coat hidden somewhere in the house… in some box …

I used to take photos of things too, before I threw them out. Our old stereo. My dad had been proud of that. I snapped a shot of it on the nature strip before the trucks came …