Status Updates From Mothering Sunday

"Yes, it was tragic," she said, with a voice like flint. And didn't say, as she might have done-at eighty she could be oracular: We are all fuel. We are born, and we burn, some of us more quickly than others. There are different kinds of com-bustion. But not to burn, never to catch fire at all, that would be the sad life, wouldn't it?

A sudden unexpected freedom flooded her. Her life was beginning, it was not ending, it had not ended. She would never be able to explain (or be required to) this illogical, enveloping inversion.
As if the day had turned inside out, as if what she was leaving behind was not enclosed, lost, entombed in a house. It had merged somehow-pouring itself outwards—with the air she was breathing.

In any case, as friends or perhaps even as lovers, or just as young Mister Paul and the new Beechwood maid he'd spotted one day in the post office in Titherton, they'd done all sorts of things together, in all sorts of secret locations.

It was a strange business, this Mothering Sunday ahead of them, a ritual already fading, yet the Nivens-and the Sheringhams-still clung to it, as the world itself, or the world in dreamy Berkshire, still clung to it, for the same sad, wishing-the-past-back reasons. As the Nivens and the Sheringhams perhaps clung to each other more than they'd used to, as if they'd become one common decimated family.