ritual

Visiting my parents always - of course - means revisiting the familiar, but it also involves its own sense of ritual.   One gesture that I love and look forward to is the little vase of flowers from the garden that my mother gathers and places on the window sill of my room.   On my last visit, she'd been sick with (non-swinish) flu and there were no flowers - an absence that I registered at an emotional as well as at an aesthetic level: it provided a marker of quite how unwell she'd been feeling.   But this time, the flowers - white and pale yellow roses - are back, and manage to look cheerful, even against what was, this morning, a sodden wet garden.