Sunday 19 September 2010

"...for I'm to be Queen of the May"

As a lady passed the shop counter today, heading into the depths of the shop, she turned to her friend and said: "This is the bookshop where I had that strange experience...." and just as she was about to say what the strange experience was, she moved out of my earshot.
However, when she came back to the desk, she told me. Her mother learned a lot of poetry by heart at school, as children did back then, and one of the verses she used to quote was about telling mother she had to be up early "for I'm to be Queen of the May." Her daughter had always refused to believe that this was a real poem.
About a month after her mother died, she was browsing in the poetry section of the bookshop. She pulled one book off the shelf to have a look and, as sometimes happens, another book fell out at the same time. It opened to the very poem that she had always said didn't exist! She firmly believes it was her mother, saying "I told you so!"

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