The Last Room I Remember
The room has a window on the east side, and so the morning is kind to it. I sit in my chair by the window from a little before the breakfast tray arrives until a little after. The chair is a chair I have had for many years. It has a cushion which my daughter made for me, or perhaps my daughter's daughter, in a fabric with small blue flowers, and the cushion is placed so that it supports the small of my back, because the small of my back is not what it used to be.
The room is not large. I have, in my time, lived in larger rooms. But the room is enough. It has a bed along the north wall, with a blanket folded at the foot which is a blanket I knitted in, I believe, 1978, although I would not swear to the year. It has a chest of drawers on which stand three framed photographs: my husband Martin, in the photograph from the garden in the year he retired; my daughter Clare with the boys; and a photograph whose subject I cannot, on most mornings, remember, but which I do not wish to put away, because there was a reason I placed it there and the reason was sound when I placed it.
There is a small table by the chair where I sit. On the table there is a book, which I am no longer quite reading, and a glass of water, which the girl who comes in the mornings keeps fresh for me, and a little clock which is round and white and which tells me, when I turn it towards me, that it is a quarter