From January through March I participated in a daily writing challenge – each day the people participating were given a new prompt and asked to produce a new piece. This is one of the selections from that project. The title is the prompt.

We were never to enter the living room, with its velvet JFK portrait presiding over the stiff plastic-covered couch and chairs, the never-lit fireplace that chilled the chamber with its drafts on cold Irish winter days, and the glass-diamond-encrusted chandelier that every few months dropped another bead onto the floor as its cheap too-thin wiring gave way under gravity’s relentless pull.

“It’s only for guests,” mother would yell at us as she’d chase us out (towel, pan, stick, knife or whatever else she’d picked up waving in her hand). Yet she always hosted neighbors and relatives in the adjacent cramped dining room.

Over time I realized it was a shrine. Not to a person or to a god, but to a place and a time. 

In an act of outrageous expense and rebellion she’d insisted our father transport the furnishings all the way from America when he had decided to move back to Ireland to start his God-forsaken farm. The room reminded her of what she had in her palace in Chicago, a land of unfathomable riches in a time of unimaginable luxury for her. She’d never wanted to return to the land of her birth.

Each day we spent in that damp dreary house (as my father’s health grew worse and worse from the molds that slowly but unstoppably were filling his lungs with fluid, and more and more of the tasks of the failing farm fell to her) she’d come to the room. I’d see her sitting alone and silently crying, the only sound being the squelching of plastic as her body shook on the couch.