Reflections

 

A lovely morning greeted me on the other side of the front upstairs window when I first got up this morning. I had gone upstairs to the front bedroom, where I now have a work room, in what was Steve’s Mum’s bedroom, until she changed her mind about living until she was a hundred, which is what she always swore she would do. It all got to be too hard and just plain horrible for her in her last couple of years. As Bette Davis is quoted as saying “Old Age is not for sissies”.

 

At first it was a very uncomfortable feeling, having to go through all her things, sorting out what to take to the charity shop and what to give away. Strangely not many people wanted to keep a souvenir. Nobody offered to help me with this chore either and that I can understand; I felt bad enough and I was lumbered with the job that had to be done. 

Caroline Mary Belt has been gone with the angels for a year and a half now and I am only just starting to feel comfortable sitting in what was her room for the twenty four years she lived with us. I can joke now about how many pairs of scissors she had hoarded away and how rich I am in handbags, hats and sandals. Oh and stationary; cards and notelet. She gave me the jewellery that she used to wear everyday whilst we waited for the ambulance before her last stay in hospital from which she did not return, she felt she would not return.  

At last I find myself sitting happily at the bay window at the long French table we have brought home that I use as a desk and a sewing table. I still feel her presence in this room but as a calm feeling as if she is happy that I have taken up a working residence in the room. 

All my writing is done sitting here, facing out of the window, overlooking the front of two neighbours opposite. One is just a wide driveway and the one just to my right has pretty gardens. It is bright and light and peaceful and suits me well for working at the computer, writing poetry or recording stories for reading, embroidery, and work with my sewing machine or just reading my latest book. It is slowly becoming the work room I could have done with long ago but had to work at the table from which we eat our meals, sorting papers out across our bed.

It is bright and light and peaceful and suits me well for working at the computer, writing poetry or recording stories for reading, embroidery is also a hobby, and work with my sewing machine or just reading my latest book. It is slowly becoming the work room I could have done with long ago but had to work at the table from which we eat our meals, sorting papers out across our bed. 

At last, I find myself sitting happily at the bay window at the long French table we have brought home that I use as a desk and a sewing table. I still feel her presence in this room but as a calm feeling as if she is happy that I have taken up a working residence in her room. She was ninety four when she went to meet her maker. I was her prime carer, born just before war broke out in 1939. 

One of the things she complained about when she was alive, was that I did not ‘Just sit’ with her often enough. It would have been funny if it was not so bloomin’ irritating that she treated me more like a maid than her daughter in law. Well, I am sitting there now.