(Written 22 March, but wanted to fill up the back dates.)

When I packed up my mom's apartment, she had not yet died. She was in a home, and the state was only going to subsidize one residence or the other. Thus, the need to pack up her apartment.

She was a seamstress many a summer ago, so she had pieces of cloth about. I had boxes to mail stuff and pictures to mail, so I used the cloth to pad them. In particular, she had a dozen or more one-foot-squares of saffron fabric.

I told Kitten about this when I returned home (well, 'home' back then was my in-law's condo) and she wanted to make crafts with the fabric. Well, back then we were trying to keep the amount of clutter down to the very minimum so I told her it'd have to wait until after we moved in.

We moved in. Now we had boxes to unpack. She asked for them and I explained that we had to unpack the boxes here before we went to get the stuff from her grandparents' condo.

We're still not fully unboxed. One pile of boxes in the dining room corner are our photos. Gradually, I realized that I was avoiding unboxing my mom's photos, hence avoiding getting the saffron cloth my daughter wanted so very much.

Today I got it for her. I didn't unbox the photos, I just took out the fabric. I told her it was a gift from her grandmother. I couldn't say much else. Fortunately, she was so taken with it that nothing else needed to be said.

I didn't cry then. I can't say the same now.