Picture Perfect Moment

She walks around the empty house, no pictures on the walls, no decorations up, no kettle whistling on the stove. Just an empty old house creaking and moaning from the February winds. Everything is packed away, anxiously waiting by the door for the movers to come and get it later in the afternoon. To be taken to the retirement home where she will now be living.

Her heart had been crushed for weeks from when all her children came over to the house and told her that they were putting her in a retirement home. They fought and bickered for hours with her saying it would be better, and they just wanted to make sure that she would be safe and to make sure that she didn’t have to worry about bills, and then ending it saying it was because they lover her. But she thought how could they love her if their trying to get rid of me by putting her in the care of complete strangers!!!

Today was the day she was leaving. The house she bought for her kids, to raise them to do everything humanly possible to give them the best life she could, and this is how they repay her? By kicking her out of her own house. She knew it was a couple of hours till she leaves so she went and sat on her rocking chair by the door to wait.

Then she noticed a picture on the floor so she leans over to get it, her old body wasn’t as good as it once was, it cracked as she reached. When she got it she pushed her glasses up to examine it better, it was a picture she remembered taking of her three girls walking out of the door yard, in light snow that gently crested them as they walked towards the road. She remembered how she had taken that about twenty years ago when her kids were all teenagers, she remembered how much she cared for them and how she raised them to be good people, then she wondered how they could be doing this to her? Then like a wave crashing in to the shore it struck her why they were doing this! They were doing it for her, because they did love and care about her, because like on that winter day she made sure they were all warm, happy and safe, they were doing that for her! She started to tear up once she realized how wrong she had been.

The next day once she was all situated at the home she call all her kids, to apologize for her anger towards them the past weeks and then about the picture she found, which was now hung up on the wall in a beautiful frame in her new room. Then at the end of each phone call she told them something that she wished she said more often, “I love you”.