and it closed in 2019 and is now a dental practice.
My father died in 1994. My mother had a stroke in 2003 and I looked after her in this house for eleven years, and she died upstairs in the front bedroom in 2014.
I have a niece I am close to and a cat and a book group and a raised bed with far too much rhubarb in it.
I say all that because when people hear this story they picture a woman sitting by a window for forty years, and I want to be accurate: I had a life. It was not a waiting room.
It just had a door in it that I never opened, and I knew exactly where the door was, and about four times a year I would find myself standing near it.
On my fiftieth birthday I got out the road atlas. I
