The fifteenth of May

I have this memory of you at our house. I can’t remember why you were there but we were young, very young. We (me and Laurie) had been running around outside in the garden. We were barefoot, we were always barefoot. I don’t know if it was summer or we were just running wild like we were allowed to.  

But the memory isn’t of us in the garden. We are lying on mum and dad’s bed the wooden one they don’t have any more.  We’re on our backs right at the foot of the bed waving our bare legs and feet in the air above us. And you’re standing over us taking turns to grab and then smell our grass-stained feet.  

And every time you take a sniff your face contorts, scrunching your nose, recoiling your head back away from the pudgy foot in your hand and you say “pooooooooooooh”  

And I remember laughing.  

Laughing so hard at this face and this sound you were making. We asked you to do it again and again and again. And you obliged. For your eldest two grandchildren pretending to be disgusted by the smell of their dirty feet was no trouble at all.  

I wonder if other people hold these same memories I do. My memories of places and people and details are so strong. I can hear your voice saying that word, I can hear the strange twang of your accent and when I think of your accent. If I think long enough I can hear you saying ‘Anthony’ (because you always seemed like the only person to call Dad by his full name) and then when I think of that I can hear you half singing half humming a song as you would make your way around the large wooden table in the kitchen at Kiln Lane.  

This year was the first time the 15^th of May passed and I didn’t think of you.  

I mark the absence of you and others in the passing of dates, usually one per year, a day spent without you. But I think I’ve tried to stop counting because at some point there might be more without you than there were with you.  

When I go over my memories, I think about all the ones you had that I don’t know about. Now I know there were some… because I’ve seen the photos.  

You put together these albums of photos and the odd postcard added for good measure. They are all black and white apart from the postcards which I think you bought because they added colour to remind you of the place you had been. The wonderful stills of you and your friends travelling Europe!  

Grouped together with your friends in beautiful wide skirted dresses and 50s swim suits. Rarely ever all looking at the camera at the right time but with nobody to know until the film was developed. I have photos like these of me and my friends. On nights out, on holiday celebrating birthdays and jobs and just being together. And I can guess that’s what you were doing. 

There’s you alone sometimes, sat on a wall or by a restaurant. I ask for those too. I ask Matt and my friends to capture just me in the moment, in a different place. Choosing a wall to lean against or a sign that will jog my memory of where we were. The difference is I can take a look and decide whether I like it enough or if another one needs taking. You just had to trust Marie not to chop your head off, and she had to trust you to do that same.  

Then there’s the ones of you with the waiters…We never had a chance to talk about that! I like these photos from your travels the best. We are lucky to have so many of but these ones feel different. They are from the time before you became my grandfather’s wife or my father’s mother… when you were just you.