Christmas is coming.

I am walking with my daughter, singing carols to her.

'What is holly?' asks my daughter.

'It's a plant,' I say. 'It has prickly leaves and bright red berries.'

And I tell her how it grew in our garden, and how every December, at the start of Advent, my Mum and I would go out with our oversized gardening gloves and shears and cut bits off from the hedges, and then go in and stick them in oasis to make a table display; one for the dining table, and one for the coffee table. And I would always do the coffee table one, sitting on the sofa with the fire crackling, Mum smoking a cigarette by the window, asking for her approval at intervals. The candles would be lit on the mantelpiece, and the nativity scene would come out and, at some point - although never early enough - we would go out to buy the Christmas tree, and she'd decorate it in a way my brother and I never liked, with the tinsel going in lines from the top to the bottom. We wanted it to go round, like in the films.'When you're grown up, you can do your own trees however you like', she said. And we do.

I tell her all this on the way to the library.

'When I'm grown up, can I paint my Christmas tree blue?' she asks. You can do whatever you like, I say. 

'Can we get some holly? Can we make table displays, just like you and your Mum did?'

Nowhere here sells holly.

My mother's birthday was yesterday. She would have been 67.

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It is January.

There are shelves in a house too many miles away, big oak shelves, lined with books I was introduced to, one by one, throughout my teenage years. Austin and Eliot and Hardy and Dickens and Somerset Maughan and Emile Zola and Graham Greene and Wilkie Collins and the Brontes. She would connect them by style, or era, or theme. I would sit on the sofa by the fire and read and ask questions. 'What's hyperbole?' I asked. 'Like the Superbowl, but bigger', she answered. And she laughed, but I didn't get it.

I want to go through those bookshelves. Those books aren't mine, though. They're not hers anymore, either.

I cannot stop thinking about them.  All those worlds she gave me the spyglass to, all that walking across moors with my hair down pretending I was Eustacia Vye or Catherine or Arwen or anyone, really, with dark hair and a brooding look and disaster looming. '60's penguin paperbacks with their price on the front in shillings and pence, and her name written on the inside of the cover. Her maiden name, then my father's surname. Nothing with my stepfather's name on. When did she stop writing her name on her books? I don't know.

My grief is put in a box and packed away just like the things of hers I took. I am not sitting at a table looking at her empty chair. I am not sitting in my childhood home noting that I cannot smell cigarette smoke or Chanel 19 or mimosa candles. I can think of it, her chair, my Grandma's chair, her pictures on the wall, her books, her silk dressing gown, her furniture, the vase I bought her that she hated and she kept telling me to take whenever I was home, but I can't see it. My stepfather lives in a house camouflaged with my mother.

It is almost a year since she died. I have run and worked and parented and laughed and travelled and slowly accepted that the world will always be a bit darker, but the world is still the world. 

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We rented a cottage in the village in which I was born, for the summer. I visited the church in which I was baptised. The school I briefly went to. I searched for the houses I lived in, and found one, but not the other. We drove around for three hours. I couldn't remember. My father couldn't remember when I asked him. It didn't matter. I saw the river we fished in, and the mountains we climbed up and tobogganed down, and that was enough. And I ran. I ran up mountains and through forests and got frightened by the sound of the coyotes. Sometimes I thought I'd found her. Then I'd stop running, and realise I hadn't. I ate a croissant at a baker's we used to go to after school. When I was little, I used to choose chocolate donuts. I remembered the colour of her coat.

I want to reach a conclusion.

I don't think there is one.

I miss her.