The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

“She stopped me having to be Chrissie or Lucy or Julia, made me Mum instead. She’s my friend and my girl and my funny, stubborn, constant companion. I love her down to the dark space around her bones, and I want to keep her, to have her with me, to smell her on my clothes. I want to tie tinsel in her hair at Christmas and put a new height mark on the door on her sixth birthday and slip into bed beside her before I go to sleep tonight. I want to carry on being her world.”