her world has shrunk. her stories, repeated many times from my earliest memory, are repeated with different meaning; the stories – some stories – are different. others are the same, and yet, they, too, are different. all her stories are told from greater distance and from a different perspective, the perspective that the end is approaching, the perspective of distance from the world in so many ways.
and so we spend our time together. my mother loves the simple homemade meals i cook for her – the salads, the fish, the plain fresh vegetables – food cooked for two, not two hundred. i read to her, this time a 17th century 