..and I speak with them, regularly.

I see my paternal grandfather, a carpenter, who built the shelves where these books always stood. I see him winding the toy tin goose, who waddled along red velveteen carpet to lay it’s golden eggs. He smells of wood shavings, cement and Swan Lager.

I see his wife, my nanna, who would recall her youth, her days as a flapper girl with a gleam in her eye. The woman who nursed in war, won this mirror as a trophy for sport, and who prayed to her Catholic God with the rosary beads in her slender fingers. Her nails, always polished clear, her hands always immaculate, right up to her passing.
 
 

I see my maternal nanna, who passed long before she ought, making pavlova and baking Christmas lunches in her kitchen, always attached to two items. First, the oxygen bottles and breathing assist tubes; secondly, the cigarette in a long holder and always, always in her hand. Even near her ending, her life was glamorous, melodramatic and flamboyant.

I see GG, operating his butcher shop in Fremantle. GG, always smiling and laughing, the pain behind his smile only obvious to those that knew. The jokes, the plastic cockroaches, fake fingers in the car boot, gemstone drum always rolling. His Delvene, I will always be.

I see family members, now long gone but once united. Long before family politics caused the drift, like oceans in the tide, the ebb and flow finally taking them away from me forever.

I see dead people.

And I miss them, everyday.