her wet nose

My mother says there are rooms she can’t sit in, can’t linger too long in. The rooms must still somehow hold the shape of her body; carry the muffled shuffle of her paws. The kitchen is one of these rooms and now I think of my mother existing only in the hallways of the house, the den and her bedroom.

I miss her too even though the rooms I live in never held her. I know I’ll feel the emptiness when I return this weekend like the house has lost of a bit of its soul. It was going to be the weekend I was going to say goodbye to her, but her age couldn’t hold her. I’ll miss her soft ears, how she’d bend her head toward the side I was rubbing. And her wet nose, though I tried, sometimes in vane, to avoid it.