No program. No agenda. No appointment to get to after.
Just the afternoon and the two chairs in her room and the light coming through the window at the angle it comes at that hour, which I know now, which has become familiar the way things become familiar when you are in a room often enough that the light at different hours is information you have accumulated without meaning to, that you hold without filing, that is just part of knowing the room the way I have come to know her room.
She was clear that afternoon.
Clear and not in a hurry, which is its own quality, the not-in-a-hurry, which happens on the clear afternoons when she has the leisure of her own mind and is not trying to hold onto anything or find anything or manage the gap between what she wants to say and what she can reach. She was just there, in the chair, in the afternoon, and I was there, in the other chair, and we were simply two people in a room together who love each other and had nowhere to be.
We talked about small things.
The bird outside the window, which she had been watching for days and had named, not with a bird name but with a person name, which I found both charming and characteristic, which is exactly the kind of thing she has always done, the naming of things around her as though the world is full of particular individuals rather than categories, each one worthy of its own designation. We talked about the bird and the light and something she had seen on the television that had made her think of something from years ago that she had not thought about in a long time and was glad to have back.
I did not check the time.
That is the thing I want to hold from that afternoon. I sat in the chair in the good light with my mother on a clear day when she was entirely herself and I did not check the time. I was in the afternoon the way I have been learning to be in things, all the way in, present to the bird and the light and the story from years ago and the particular quality of her voice on a clear afternoon when nothing is being managed and the conversation just goes where it goes.
It went somewhere good. It always goes somewhere good when she is clear and I am present and neither of us is anywhere but there.
