Mum
She was so, so consistent. Reliable, stable, unwavering, yet gentle and warm. So much happened in our Leven Street home; every room, the passages, the back porch, the playroom and even the garage where I seldom saw her were domains of all the kinds of living you’d imagine from a family with growing boys and girls, and yet none of it was home unless she was there. In the rare times we were at home without her, it felt like we were simply biding our time until she returned. Without her, life was on pause. One ordinary but memorable day I arrived home from school to an empty house. No one home. I would discover later that mum had some benign reason for being out, but at the time it rocked my world. It was as if I had walked onto the set of a horror movie where the earth was deserted of life, a ghost town. I felt anxious. I need not have been; everything was in order, there was food in the cupboards, everything was clean and tidy as it always was … but she was not ther
