After six weeks with my arm in plaster followed by a month at my mother’s, after two days straight sleeping I finally got to grips with my own house and garden.
Nature abhors a vacuum, though it doesn’t mind a little light dusting, though that wasn’t going to fix what is wrong round here.
After the first few weeks after my father died, in which, as I came home, I stepped straight into the kitchen and started scrubbing whilst swearing and crying, my husband took the gentle hint and now turns up in Cheltenham looking exhausted and needing a good twenty minutes of praise in the clean kitchen. Woe betide, however, the woman who would injudiciously start opening her own cupboards, for she would be swept away in the tide of trash that was popped in out of sight.
Please remember that there are two men living here, unsupervised, one of whom regards this as upmarket student digs and behaves accordingly. On Wednesday he warned me, nervously, that there would be three large monitors arriving but that they would only be in the hall temporarily. See, who says we are incapable of learning after the age of twenty five? On Thursday when we got back from taking my mother shopping (I got downgraded at the checkout from ‘servant’ to ‘slave’ as in, with an airy wave of her hand ‘My slave will do the packing.’ From the far shores of dementia, the woman has quite a perceptive overview), the monitors were nowhere to be seen. They were all in his bedroom balanced on top of everything. He looked up from explaining how he will sell two of them for a modest profit at some unspecified time in the future, to say accusingly, ‘I had to tidy my bedroom to get these in, you know.’
Where was the third monitor? Why yes indeed, he felt he deserved it and awarded it to himself. How nice, any day now I may feel I deserve rent. Especially when this vegetarian opened the oven to cook a chicken for the carnivores to find the entire oven that I had left so spotless you could have cooked a dinner in it, was coated with brown grease. I am so particular about my oven, because I hate cleaning it, I clean it after every use. I cleaned it and put the chicken in it and after lunch the S&H will return the shelves to showroom condition or pack his cats and go.
Then there is the garden. While I have been tending my mothers gravel and concrete wasteland, nature has taken over my garden. Nature has a sense of humour; considering who I am looking after, the flower that had run riot and taken over every border is the forget me not. They have rooted all over the bottom patio on the flowers fallen from the magnolia, which I missed flowering while I was engaged elsewhere. On the plus side, many years of digging the soil have made it relatively easy to uproot the weeds. I shall have to have bought-in plants this year and I have missed all the bargains except for the bizzy lizzies with which I filled my mother’s urns. I do have some alstromeira on the go; the one I took down to my mother is on the verge of flowering, those here, ‘I didn’t know you were expecting me to water them, you never said, I did water that thing but not them’, are stunted. I left them encapsulated against the frost, which also, unfortunately, encapsulates them against the rain too.
I haven’t been working solidly, I have been card making, for fun and to give away. I haven’t been doing proper miniatures, because they take too much concentration. I don’t seem to have much of it at all; I phone my mother three times a day to get her up, send her to bed (or she falls asleep in the chair) and check she has taken her midday medication. I got busy card making last night and forgot to send her to bed. I didn’t wake her this morning either; I was changing my bed from depths of winter thick duvet to optimistically thin summer effort plus realistic extra quilts.
I will have to stop having fun with you and phone the little dear any minute. That’s the thing with dementia, there’s always something to look forward to. (I shall probably be struck down for that comment now and phone to find she’s trapped in the garage or sat on the cat.) Oh joy.
I’m hoping to cultivate a selective memory. like my husband, so that when this is over, I can pretend all the misery never happened instead of forgetting it not.
The legacy, by the way, (did you guess) was cleaning. If you go away, or die, that’s what you leave, really, cleaning.
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JaneLaverick.com – clean as a whistle but only in the conscience, so far.
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