The prompts I had for this month were:

Travel and Library Card

I actually didn’t submit this one because I go so caught up in the Library Card special item that I completely missed the travel assignment!!

Here’s what I wrote anyway

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It wasn’t a surprise when Dad called mid-week. Nan had been ill for a long time and I’d already said my goodbyes. I’d told her about the silly romcom I finished reading last week. It was frivolous but we laughed and held hands.

What was a surprise was what I was left in her will: some jewellery, furniture she’d promised me, and… her library card.

It sat on my desk for the weeks following. Her faded passport photo looking grimly at me. Eventually I went to the library around the corner from her bungalow, now for sale, and booted up the Windows Vista PC that the library system runs off.

Feeling like a hacker, I logged into my Nans account and saw her list of books over the past decade. It was pretty eclectic: Dickens, Austen, Jilly Cooper -Nan! -, some loose women biographies, and local history books.

It got my thinking: these were books she’d sat down, sipped tea, sat up late at night, and told her friends about at church group. I decided then I would work my way through the list, as a peek into her life.

Honestly, the books were not to my taste. But being slightly OCD that I am, I managed to roughly line up when each book was borrowed with what my Nan was doing at the time. On a cruise, or when a friend had passed away. I felt closer to her as I read.

The last book was a dusty tome tucked away on the top shelf, a strange choice. She had borrowed it a week before she was admitted to hospital.

As I flicked the cover open, a letter fell on the floor. “My dearest Lucy…”