The Helgas

My mother is the reason I have this new house. If it had not been for the money she left me, there is no way I would have been able to afford to buy my own place. I had resigned myself to the fact that though I may one day have been able to escape 565 Christie, I would always be a renter.
But let's get back to Mom, good old CHY. Mom and I, we liked taking classes together. We sat beside each other and wrote notes if the class was boring (and the last class we took...Intro to Mac was just that) When it ended I wanted to engage her with another class. Try as I might to get her interested in bellydancing, she just refused.

And she tried to convince me to take an interior design class in the winter. And I balked. I knew I would never own my own place to decorate, so what was the point of learning interior design.

I believe her answer was, "You never know, you just might."

She was right. Yes. She's gone now. She passed away suddenly in October, and I miss her every day. But she was right. Here I am a homeowner.

And what kills me is the irony, or the impossibility of it all...she would have loved this place, she would have been so excited...but she's not here...at least in human form. So, anything that I can find that makes me think of my mother I want to have here. Because I want this to be our place.

This explains why I bought two broken clocks with two frauleins who are supposed to bounce up and down on the swing as the clock ticks along. I found them at a thrift store up the street, and seeing those clocks took me back to the time when my mother bought me the same type of clock in Ottawa.

When my mother moved to Ottawa for one year to get this great high-paying job, we became quite close. I was living in Toronto at the time and I would take the bus down to see her on the weekends. The first time I went to visit, I met this woman who looked a lot like my mother and even sounded like her, but she sure didn't seem like her. This woman was about 20 years younger and liked to go out for coffee and hunt for bargains at Big Buds and go out for lunch, and she liked to go to the Rideau Market and shop. And yet this was my mother. She was out of Fredericton, with her own place, her own job and she was free.

One weekend, we were there browsing in the market and we saw this little shop that was selling these clocks. We both fell in love with them immediately...the idea of this girl on a swing that goes up and down with the ticking of the clock. My mother bought me a clock, and I was so thrilled with it. I called the girl on the swing Helga. When I moved to Vancouver a few years later, my mother often enquired about my clock and the girl on the swing. She would do things like that. I moved so many times in that period of my life I can't remember whatever happened to that clock, but my heart leapt when I saw two similar ones in that second hand store.
And now the two helgas sit on their swings in the kitchen, they're pretty quiet, no bouncing, but I still love seeing them.

One more thing about the flowers at the top of this entry. One night I was playing around with my camera (one of the million bonuses about having no TV!) and I fiddled with this image. These are my flowers, and one of them, the most flamboyant and beautiful flower stretching out towards the sun away from the more pedestrian flowers. That bold fuschia geranium with the "look-at-me" quality, that one, that's my mom.