Labor

My long ago mother used to string together cheap jewelry, baubles and glitter threaded onto silvery strings for a begrudging merchant who kept a cramped second floor office near what I later knew as Smithfield Market. I would go with her for I had nowhere to go but with her. The very thought of 'nowhere' now fills my mind with the muddy puddles I used to jump into as we walked for miles to a place where she sold her time absorbing, paid for hourly and tedious labor. A place where an elderly, sour and sniffing man doled out a few coins into her open hand. A scant amount and never enough of it for us to ride a London bus back to where we came from.