She keeps the jars on bookshelves, alongside a stuffed brown owl she calls Lucy and her poetry collection. The jar she holds now is Japanese in style, the handles banded in gold, the porcelain thick and crackled with age. They bought it at a market in Sydney on their honeymoon, thinking it might be valuable. He wanted to haggle. She paid full price.
She lifts the lid and tightly folded letters bulge from its belly. She uses her fingertips to press them back, but it’s clear the jar is full, she’ll need another one already. The blue tea caddy Joe found at that garage sale will do. It was garish, she’d thought at the time, though she’d never have said so. Now the colour reminds her of his eyes, lit with the thrill of the bargain, waving his prize aloft as they walked home on a cool morning.
She digs it out of the cupboard, carries it into the study. She goes to the desk, reaches for a piece of scrap paper. Joe was always careful with recycling, he’d save everything, envelopes from birthday cards, old bills, flyers. Think of the trees, he’d say, and she’d roll her eyes, then find somewhere to store it all anyway.
She takes the paper, a pen, and a book to lean on. Makes her way down the hall to the bedroom, opens the wardrobe door, settles into a nest of cushions and old blankets she has arranged on the floor under a row of neatly pressed shirts. A dressing gown of grey wool brushes against her hair, she smells the faint must of age and something familiar, like parched earth after rain.
She writes her letter. Talks about the garden; the weeds are growing through the gravel path; the roses need pruning. A brown owl has taken up residence in the peppermint tree, she thinks it has a thing for Lucy. She’s taken to using his side of the bed again, it doesn’t help her sleep, but the shallow dip in their old mattress feels like an embrace. She can’t remember the last time she slept through the night. But she makes up for it with naps, she assures him, so, he shouldn’t feel too bad about it. Then she curls into the quiet, on the floor near his old slippers, and a golf umbrella. Draws her knees into her chest. Closes her eyes.
Later, she tucks the letter away in the tea caddy near the other jars, there are twenty-five now, counting this one. The girls arrive to check on her, they come once a week, mid-afternoon. They hang their jackets next to their father’s raincoat and ask if she’s thought about the house. Decluttering. Isn’t it time to move on, they say, tilting their heads, patting her hand. You must get lonely. No, she says. Not lonely exactly. I wouldn’t say lonely. Outside, a brown owl shifts silently on a twisted branch of a peppermint tree and waits patiently for dusk.
Author's Note:
I was brought up by an estuary. As a kid my dad would take my older sister and I crabbing. When I was too little to wade on my own, he towed me along in a plastic baby bath tied to his belt and I would float along in the gentle sway. Now, when I visit my father, I drive down to a narrow old road, lined with paperbarks to photograph kangaroos, egrets, spoonbills and an osprey that lives in the skeleton of an old tree on the shore. I am happiest in nature near the sea. And reading. Of course, reading.
Gillian O'Shaughnessy is a writer and reader from Walyalup, Fremantle in Western Australia with words in Best Small Fictions, 2023 and 2024, and the journals SmokeLong Quarterly, Jellyfish Review, Fractured Lit, MoonPark Review, Night Parrot Press, among others. She clings to Twitter @GillOshaughness and her website is gillianoshaughnessy.com
Beautiful Gill