In Annailo's mind…
Your hat was on the table, waiting for you in a house heavy of silence. Beside it, a fly was crawling over some crumbs, before it flew up and landed on a blue cup on the kitchen sink. It was still half-full of cold coffee, abounded and alone.
I was sitting on a chair in the corner, looking over the room that had changed colour one of the last nights of the year.
Outside, the garden rested in the same silence as the house, an invisible carpet of grief was covering the surface of your world. But once, not so long ago, the flowers by the red old house had waved in the summer-breeze, while the birds were singing in the trees along the driveway. A wheelbarrow waited for you on the lawn, full of hay and weed. Later I would sit on it, and you would push it down the field to the farthest corner of our land. You and me – together.
You would be sitting by the kitchen-table with your blue coffee-cup and a handful of biscuits, bending down under the curtain to watch the life outside. Whistling on an old song and laugh gently of the beauty when all the birds flew up from the trees at once. I would sit by the other side of the table, watching you and watching your hands that were holding the cup tight. Once in a while they would stroke over your hair, black as soot without a single grey hair. I admired every move you made, and I soaked in the image and the smell of you. Everything was safe then, and I was happy. Never did it cross my mind that this would one day be a memory, that you would be somewhere else, and I would be sitting here alone.
When the coffee-cup was empty and the biscuits were only crumbs left on the table, we walked to the door. You put your hat on, took my hand and said: “Never leave the house without your hat on, girl. Let it be your trustful friend and companion.”
You left us on a clear winter night in December. The moon and the stars were shining brighter than I had ever seen before; it was as heaven had opened up to welcome you. I didn’t cry that night, when I walked across your garden, making small steps in the snow in the starlight from above. A cold emptiness had taken place in a young soul, and the feet did not know how to walk the path alone. The last night of the year I grew up without you. I shivered in the cold when I stretched my hand up to the sky and whispered: “But you forgot to put your hat on, grandpa”.
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