Lines of flight

Abstract

I washed my mother's clothes today, gently in Lux flakes. The bubbles a baby froth - each one reflecting my world in its tight rainbow slick. My hands set up a methodical rhythm of rubbing and squeezing and rinsing - the task insulating me from grief. Tears fell though. I couldn't stop them. They salted her white cotton nightie. Right until the wasted end there was something girlish about my mother in a nightie. I could picture her as a child, fine ankles just visible under the double hem; bare feet flashing over the cold farmhouse floors, getting dew soaked on the way to the dunny, leaving grass on the sheets where she'd burnt her feet on the ironstone hotty. Or the night when, half woman-half girl, she wrapped me tightly in that christening shawl, pulled her rough woollen leggings up under her blood-stained nightie and left. Where my mother grew up, death was a hushed and shameful business. My aunt's stillborn son was swiftly named and rushed into the ground before her milk came in - she never laid eyes or hands or lips upon him. The undertaker's daughter, with her stories of stiff, powdered bodies, was never invited to birthday parties. There was no viewing of bodies and no open caskets.