Too Cold For Snow

things she had to do. Pay gas. Bring keys. Empty cupboard.
    I wanted her to find herself a bower, a shaded settlement among dark leaves where she could build a nest of comfort about her, but that wasn’t to be.
    On the January day I spotted a glaucous gull near the Cardiff heliport, one of the staff from Noddfa phoned me up to tell me that she’d been fighting. It’s not a call you expect to have, ever, let me tell you. About your mother, fighting! Some old collier had taken a pop at her in the dining room – an altercation about digestive biscuits apparently – and she had slugged him one on the nose in return. My mother – the biffer, the bopper, the old scrapper. At least she won the bout. That’s a new species of pride. The octogenarian pugilist. The woman who nursed me.
    If only she could build a nest for herself. If only those chicken bone fingers could gain enough dexterity to start to weave again. She could then gather spiders’ webs, from the undusted nooks and arachnid corners of Noddfa and with that gossamer – strong enough to strangulate bluebottles, delicate enough to trap wisps of dew – she could knit-one-purl-one, give shape to her bower. She could line it with the fine grey hair that candy flosses out of her yellowing skull.
    A strong nest, that’s what she needs. Consider the long-tailed tit, that busy grey and pink denizen of the willow world. It builds a nest made of moss, hair feathers and silvery threads of gossamer which it shapes into a gourd, strong enough to hold the weight of two birds, and then more eggs, in fact as many as sixteen eggs, and then the rapidly growing chicks and finally the fledgling birds. The whole extraordinary architecture – shaped using as many as two thousand feathers – lasts just the length of a season and then falls apart as if it’s never been. So my mother’s nest could be one of gossamer, and she could sit contentedly within its silvery threads. Snug as eggs. Her eyes are meshed with red flecks, like a jackdaw’s egg.
    It took me until I was a fully-grown man, somewhere in my early forties, before I could tell my mother I loved her. I’d visit her every week, without fail, and would take her shopping to the Carmarthen Safeway before it became Morrisons where she would display all the parsimonious skills of someone who lived through a World War, finding every discount sticker and always taking the newest yoghurt pots from the back of the display. We’d always stop for lunch on the way back home in a village so off the beaten track it probably had werewolves scouting round the refuse bins at night. It was in a sharp sided cwm, which never saw daylight, exacerbated by swathes of Sitka spruce that had been planted twenty years ago and now seemed to lay siege to the place. The old lady would eat an enormous mixed grill of chops, eggs and kidneys with all the avidity of a gannet downing mackerel.
    The next time I visit Noddfa someone has installed double-glazing over her eyes, and poured liquid cement down her ear canal. She is a shop window dummy and a very sad display at that. Like a down-at-heel florists’ showing a wilted tulip in a vase of green water. Zombification doesn’t suit her one jot. It’s all a matter of meds. You’d have thought that the mighty pharmaceutical industry with its concrete acres of laboratories and infinite profit horizons could devise something to take an old gal’s anxiety away without buggering up her locomotive functions. But there doesn’t seem to be a magic pill to stop her fretting, to control her hallucinations. One experimental concoction, a mix of chemical stun gun and elephant tranquilliser, knocked her clean into a mini-coma for five days.
    I know this guy, Billy Wired down in Burry Port, who claims to have tried every drug in the world: injected ketamine between his toes, snorted peyote in such quantity that he became a pterodactyl for four days and subsisted on nothing more than the occasional Mesozoic fish. He once tried a narcotic from New Guinea that turned his skin permanently green. Even now his skin has a sickly hue. So my guess is that Billy would be able to rustle up something to banish all her anxiety. But at the moment she’s at the mercy of the rattling pill trolley in the care home, doomed to a whirling world of hallucinations so powerful that, were I still a drug-hungry student with a penchant for nightly brain alterations, I’d be more than mildly envious of her – someone who could