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Her name is Jean, she is 88 today

12, February 2006, around 10.11am… Jean Roper is 88 today. Sitting cross-legged in her favourite chair at the kitchen table, she carefully begins to pick the sticky-tape away from the bright-coloured paper wrapped around a box.

 

“I can feel Nanna Roper’s influence here today,” she jokes with a playful twinkle in her eye. “Nanna Roper could never give just one present. When I was pregnant for the first time, she sent me a huge suitcase of the most beautiful, hand-made babies’ clothes and dresses. It was wonderful. I thought; ‘oh no, I am pregnant!’”

 

She feels the actual presence of late-husband Alan in the room. Little things keep happening, things too odd to be dismissed with a logical explanation. Such as the answering machine switching on at 3am that morning, or the step-stool legs flicking back into place at 9pm on alternating nights.

 

“He was great at birthdays – he made such a fuss of them,” she reminisces. “It may be because his mother (Nanna Roper) was brought up by a Jewish family and most likely didn’t celebrate Christmas. Alan would give such wonderful birthday presents.”

 

Jean - ‘Jeannie Pops’, or ‘JP’ - is feeling calm and happy on this unusually mild Mildura February day. She received chocolates and flowers from her son on Friday, she listened to ‘Macca’ on Radio National that morning, and now there is orange coconut cake to eat and more presents to open.

 

The box in front of her contains a couple of dozen of shirts and pants in various shades of pastels. “Well, won’t I be the fashion plate of Chaffey Avenue,” she says as she lifts a t-shirt with a modern Ken Done print. She looks over to the small CD player on the kitchen bench, and begins to sing along to ‘Take me home Kathleen’.

 

“My brother, sisters and I would sing these kinds of songs at night. Mum would play the piano and we would sing at the top of our lungs, being at Tara (the family property). Dad loved it. He would ask us to sing often. He wasn’t religious, but he always wanted us to end with ‘Hail Queen of Heaven’.

 

“I always feel a bit weepy when I hear ‘Take me home Kathleen’ – it reminds me of Kathleen.”

 

Jean starts to sway as she sings along to the popular and sentimental Irish song, lost in treasured memories of older brother Bern, younger sisters Peg and Kath, her now-gone granddaughter Tara and many other people she still misses terribly.

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