Apologies, lovely readers - this chapter is currently undergoing reconstruction, so may be a little underwhelming to read at the moment! So sorry! Nevertheless, please don't be put off from reading it - the following chapters are hopefully more satisfying!!
I was out in the front garden, planting roses, when Emma and Luke arrived home from school. It was only a short walk down a few streets; in the morning I had wanted to see them through the gates on their first day back, but I figured they were capable of making their own way home together.
"How was it?" I asked immediately, directing the question more at Emma than Luke. I followed them into the kitchen, impatiently awaiting an answer as they dumped their school bags on the floor, trying with difficulty not to bombard them with questions.
"It was fun," Emma replied eventually. "I learnt a lot of new things."
"Like what?" I pushed.
"Hmm..." she paused for thought. "Well, in numeracy I learnt some of these things they call 'times tables' and, in Literacy, we had to write a description of something."
"That sounds good," I smiled, relieved that she had been okay. "How about you, Luke? Did you like Mrs Fraser?" I prompted him, wanting to hear about his day too.
He shrugged. "She was okay. Can I go watch TV?" It seemed he didn't want to talk, so I let him go watch his favourite cartoons for an hour.
Emma joined me in the garden when Luke had gone, helping me plant the rest of the roses. In the six weeks she had lived with us, I had begun to understand that she was a really "outdoorsy" person, who loved to be out in the fresh air rather than cooped up indoors, so it came as no surprise. She encouraged Barney to catch a few sticks she threw across the lawn until I gave her the job of fetching plant pots from inside the house, ready for me to put them into the holes I was preparing in the flower beds.
"Ow!" she cried, when she discovered the hard way that roses had spikes running up their stems; however this didn't dissuade her from helping me place the flowers into their new home and cover them with fresh soil, patting them down until you couldn't tell they had ever lived elsewhere.
"Don't they look pretty?" I said, when we had finished with the re-homing and were standing back to admire our new rose garden. There was now a rainbow of coloured roses, spread evenly throughout the flower beds, where before there had just been a few purple pansies and some yellow tulips. My aim had been to fill the garden with colour and beauty (in the form of roses) for myself and my family to enjoy spending time in.
Emma hesitated a moment before timidly asking "Can I pick one?". Then she took the scissors I had given her to snip the stem of a dark red flower, holding it up to the light to admire its petals, whilst being careful not to touch its spikes.
"Which vase would you like to put it in?" Once back inside the kitchen, I opened a cupboard to reveal the great selection of vases, of varying shapes and colours, each with a story behind it, I had collected over the years. One in particular brought back a flood of memories: a little, cream vase with intricately carved patterns covering its surface - a last gift from my mother before she had passed away. I was so glad that Simon's mother, Anna, was still around to be a loving grandmother to Luke and Emma, but it still brought a lump to my throat to think that they would never meet their other grandmother - or, for that matter, a grandfather.
When Emma gave no reply to my question, I asked her what was wrong.
"I don't really need a vase," she said.
"What do you mean?"
"I just want to lay my flower on the drawers in my bedroom - not in anything," she explained. I was momentarily confused until I realised she had decided this because she didn't understand that a cut flower still needed water. "For Tod."
"How about this vase?" I quickly changed the subject, not wanting to get into the whole imaginary friend thing again, lifting my mother's vase out of the cupboard with a slightly shaky hand. "You can still have it in your room, but the rose will last a lot longer."
"Okay," she agreed reluctantly. "Can I take it up now?"
I nodded in reply, so she took the vase from me, filled it up with water and gently slotted her red rose into it. Then, she slowly made her way upstairs to take it through to her room.
A few days later, when I was changing the bedsheets in Emma's bedroom, I found the rose, shrivelled and dead on top of her chest of drawers. The vase was at the opposite end of the room, smashed into hundreds of tiny pieces across the carpet. Crying silently to myself, I cleaned up one of the only possessions that had kept the memory of my mother alive.
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