Big Yellow Taxi

“Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you got til it’s gone…..”

she absent-mindedly hummed as she stared at the screen, mulling over the day’s lesson plans. For all intents and purposes it was just another day, so she didn’t pay too much attention to the Joni Mitchell song that randomly popped up from nowhere, though you would think she would have learned by now that almost always when that happened, it meant something.

“Bingo? Hang Man? Tic Tac Toe? What to do with the kids today,” she wondered, knowing her students needed a little activity to break up the day's Language Art Lesson.

Her phone beeped.

“Father has just passed away,” the message read.

Her fingers took over, instantly typing the reply:

“What?”

Then, that horrible gut gripping feeling that tells you long before you know, let alone accept it: the umbrella is gone.

There had never been anything clearer about that day she got the shocking news, four years ago. She had just never thought of him that way. Never thought about PEOPLE that way. Yet he was. And she only knew it when he was gone.

Yet to write about it, she realised as she sat down to try, was to sound cliché. Was to almost trivialise the event which exposed her forever more to the elements.  To try to describe an event many have lived through and already knew and felt, each in their own life-altering way, couldn’t and shouldn’t be done.

She made it through the school year and life went on, as it does. It continues to rain, it continues to shine, people continue to come and go and we return to routines.

But the umbrella somehow never comes back, does it.

Joni may have been right. But not anymore. 

Jasmin Webb