Home Ground

Extract

Mother,

How are you getting on there?

It's been five months since I moved here. Long enough for winter to turn to spring, and now the blazing days of summer have arrived.

At first, I was too busy unpacking and tidying to spare a glance outside. It took me a good week just to sort your things. With the place unoccupied for five whole years since you went into the hospital, I was not at all sure what the chests of drawers and cupboards might harbor, but all that emerged were endless dead cockroaches and roach droppings; I never did see a live one, nor any mice. I guess in an empty house the cockroaches breed initially, then die out in due course as the food supply runs low. But goodness, what a mass of things! There were four kitchen scales alone, and three rice cookers.