The Present

Today I'm thinking of the smaller gifts I still need to buy.
Sadly, I'm not a particularly inspired gift-giver. My husband, our four adult children and their spouses are all better than I am at imagining just the right present to give. Maybe they're more able to put themselves in another person's life, which is really bad when you consider I'm a writer.
I'm working on it.
However, sometimes I get lucky. Or -- as I interpret it -- fortuitous forces are at work. One time I was packing in preparation for flying out to visit my aged mother. I needed something special to take to her, but what? What?
It so happened that one of my writing critique partners had offered to give me a ride to our meeting, to pick me up where my husband had dropped me off. Having almost twenty minutes to spare, I popped into the nearby Bay, wandered towards the nightwear and checked out the sale rail.
I saw it right away; a peach-coloured, candlewick bedjacket. Only one, and in XL. Now, you may not even know what a bedjacket it, they are so rare and hard to find these days. But my mother loved them. Because she slept in thin-strapped nighties, 'Thirties-style, she always liked to have one of these garments to put on when she sat up in bed to read, or to drink her early-morning tea, or the late night cuppa my Dad would make for her.
These days she's in her late nineties (told you she was aged), and spends longer in bed, not only when she catches a cold or flu, or when she recovers from a broken hip as she did last year. Winter and summer, she drapes my gift around her shoulders. The soft, fluffy jacket cuddles and comforts her.
"This is the best present you could ever have given me, Bren," she says.