Inside the empty cottage, shadows of ghosts: smudges where your picture used to hang; discolored floorboards where your cactus stood guard; a sepia burn on the kitchen counter; air stained with your perfume.
Six hundred bucks to show for a lifetime’s work.
Your gifts whisper to me in my dreams.
Monica is a sustainability manager by day and a writer by night, who used to visit Cape Cod every summer and every Christmas.
Beautifully evocative. Even the title on its own brought a tear to my eye.
Julia, thank you for your lovely comment.
Although Monica’s daytime activities seem praiseworthy indeed, I hope she also sustains her nighttime literary efforts. What a sad and hauntingly expressed view of life. Is this really all most of us leave behind?
Alex, what an insightful comment. In my line of work, and particularly during these very hard times, I’ve come to realize not only that what we accumulate is worth so little, but that it is mostly unnecessary. Besides commenting on how much I miss her, and the pitiful amount of money gotten from that final yard sale, I really wanted to stress that her real gifts where our memories, the wisdom she passed down to me, and the love we shared: the “whispers in my dreams.”