Mum's lovely smile.

I had a bit of luck recently...

A while back I spent a whole day cleaning out our shed, down the back yard... it was a nightmare to do because of the rats we have living so close to a small creek... (no babbling brook this creek) its tidal and can be smelly but I like it.

When Don and I moved out here to Craggy Island in March 2004, that shed was soooo organised and clean, but there was so much work done about the place and so many fellas who just dropped shovels and empty packets and half full bags of cement spewing all over ... It was hard to get in the door. I'd put it off while Don was alive as I just could not cope with the time away out of the house that the job needed. Couldn't get anyone else to do it because only we knew what was important and what was not...

so a few weeks back it got cleaned out.

I had a find...a precious find.

My youngest sister Jackie who lives in New Zealand had stored a box of stuff with us since about 1993, the year our mother died. She appears to have forgotten about it. When I finally opened that box with extreme trepidation - after poking it with a stick and watching a colony of meat ants pour out...

Sprayed it to death...

Then carefully just upturned the whole thing....

At least three defunct rats nest with dead baby rats were inside... I kid you not... a few dried out and not so dried out corpses of mum and dad rats... thats what the ants were at...

So i loaded it all into a spare wheelbarrow and left it in the shed till all life was extinct...

Yesterday with a friend we went through this wheelbarrow...letters from my sister to mum...barely surviving, bits of crockery, little bits of cloth... and PHOTOS... PHOTOS. Some I had seen, some never seen. Some were beyond help... others damaged but still visible...

and these two... show my mother... she was born 1927...so they would be 3 to 5 years after that... they show her most wonderful smile... a smile she had till death no matter what...

just two scraps of paper... how lovely to find and have.... I will post off to my sister these forgotten treasures...and wish I didn't feel a bit angry with her for their condition... she's been busy with 3 little ones... and the living are more important...

But this little one in the photos as fragile as they are and as damaged... she was so important because it was with this smile she instilled into me some power of survival and recovery which has stood me in such good stead...she made me laugh... at her... at myself many times... and just because although life can be tragic... hand in hand with tragedy is sometimes some really funny stuff which makes you stand still and laugh and laugh and laugh, between the tears...