It's odd working weekends. Tonight is Tuesday and I have the next two days off, so tonight is my pseudo-Friday night. I do get confused sometimes, especially first thing in the morning. "What day is it? Do I have to work today?" Added to the fact that I work in two different places, I'm sure one day I'll turn up on the wrong day in the wrong place, causing my colleagues a great deal of amusement.
Tomorrow is the 4th of September, the third anniversary of our first large earthquake. It struck at 4.40 in the morning, waking everyone and terrifying everyone, but no one was killed although there was a lot of damage throughout the province. It was a long quake, about 40 seconds, and as I crouched under the dining-room table muttering Hail Marys, ("now and at the hour of our deaths") I thought it would not end until everything was destroyed and I was dead. It did stop. I found a mouthful of whisky in a bottle that had fallen over, and very good it was too. Then I went out into the garden. The stars were bright and shining in the frosty air and I had the illogical thought "I wonder if they know what happened here".
Tomorrow is also the second anniversary of my mother's death. It's so unfair that death cuts us off from each other so completely. If only we could be allowed to talk on the phone to our departed ones. That's what I miss most, just the inconsequential daily chat about little ordinary things, particularly those memories that we shared as members of the same family. Now there's no one to talk to about my childhood, or to remember funny old Mrs Malone next door, with her purple hair and incontinent cat. Ho hum.
I love your idea of a telephone link to those we have lost. It is well over twenty years since my father died, and there are still things I would like to show him, ask him... And a kazillion questions for my mother too.
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