Listen to Your Mother

I'm in the process of reorganizing some things around the house, getting rid of some things I don't need and using the empty room that was going to be my sister's, since plans changed and she's not staying with me for the moment. One change: I want to make some space at the breakfast bar my bitty kitchen has in lieu of space for a table. Without a stool, it's at a nice height for a standing desk space for me, though I tend to just use it as pantry space.

The weird thing: part of the reason I decided to do this is because I have a clear memory of Mom looking around the place when I moved in and saying, "I can just see you working on a laptop here..." It's a nice space, it looks out over the rest of the house, I can hear my music and look out the window when I want, so it makes logical sense, and she *would* spot that.

So I'm twenty minutes into tidying and thinking out my plan for making this happen when it suddenly hits me: Mom has never been here. Could never have been here. She passed away almost two years before I moved to Colorado, and long before I moved to Washington.

I'm sure I must be remembering something that happened at another place and time--the memory is too clear to be completely false. And yet, in memory, I see her *here*, so distinctly that I got chills when I woke up enough to realize I couldn't possibly be remembering something that actually happened.

In any case, I think she's right. I'd best get back to tidying....