I am often moved to tears at the slightest hint of the past.  Call it nostalgia.  Call it just plain common sense, since the way we did things yesterday is always better than the way we do things today.  Harold was my husband and now he is dead.  I cry  when I see things associated with him; so, really, I do nothing but cry.  I still hear his fingers tripping the light fantastic on the piano keys; tinkling that almost seems less ghostly today than it did in that unreachable past when it was truly being played by Harold, his shiny bald head bent over the music-making, a smile on his lips, me listening as I knitted endless coloured squares for a quilt that never saw the light of day.  In those days, the piano sounded as if I were listening to it in the future – like today – and thus was then, at that time, ghostly and strangely unreal. 

I get mixed up with things these days.  The present and the past, mixed up, yet when I look at the photo albums, I have no doubt.  Our married life in a series of black and white snapshots, our children as babies, our children as children, our children as grown men and women.  Only Percy comes round these days.  Poor old Percy stuck with visiting his old Mum when his brothers and sister are off living in modern countries with modern careers.  I don't really miss them.  I'm just glad they have done well and are happy.  I am pleased to get the odd card; and one day I've heard I'll be able to get those new-fangled things people call emails or something.  Percy might get me it one day, he says.  Poor old Percy, stuck with his poor sentimental old Mum.

"How sentimental can you get!" he'd say, when he catches me poring over old photos.

I'd nod.  I'm on the umpteenth quilt square, but they go more slowly these days.  These days. Those days.  I seem to be caught in some puzzle where I can't get out of.  A pencil and paper maze games we used to play as children.  I suppose I'm modern in the sense that I am very green.

"Mum," says Percy, "you're so green, I'm sure you'd recycle all the wastepaper back into trees if it were possible!"

Percy's silly little laugh always sounds like an effeminate giggle when he tries to make a joke.  Poor old Percy.  At least his sentimental old Mum loves him.  I cook him dinners when me leg isn't give me gyp.

Percy can – for all his faults – play a mean tune on the piano, just like his Dad.  When the mood is right, I get him to jangle a few notes.  Yes, we have no bananas, that's our favourite tune.  And Oh what a lovely bunch of coconuts, see them all in a row, a penny a pitch.  And, oh yes, What shall we do with the drunken sailor?  These days the piano hasn't seen so much use since those days.  She'll be coming round the mountain, when she comes.  And that song about a funicular railway.  All best shots in the pop parade.  I laugh.  He laughs, too.  We get on quite well, despite our differences.

Recently, Percy has stopped coming.  I now only see him last thing at night – if then.  Perhaps it's a dream.  Or perhaps he's really there.  Perhaps he's really here in spirit, whilst before I imagined him being there bodily, as it were.  He reminds me so much, now, of Harold, his dad.  My other children come in to see me now and again, looking clumsy in grown-up bodies.  They look a bit stiff, as if they feel guilty they haven't made the journey from those modern countries where they now live, travelling back into the past to see some stranger they once called Mum.  Stiff like cardboard or snapshots.

The tunes are more plaintive tonight.  Sing something Simple.  A ghost at the piano, it must be, because there is nobody sitting at the keyboard.  Keyboards, they say, are central to modern talk.  I'll believe it when I see it.  Meanwhile, I plump all the photos into the washing-up bowl, soddening into what we used to call papier mâché at junior school.  I want to recycle the memories.  How sentimental can I get? How green is my valley?

(unpublished)