Do you remember me saying I didn’t trust freezers?
I should have kept my mouth shut. It heard me!
Then in a huff it packed up!
That’s right a totally full freezer with goods lovingly
stored from good purchases and harvests, all gone. Food I had started to purchase for when my
son comes home from uni’- all gone!
While I was away too!
Luckily I was/am insured but we had to go through the heart
breaking task of writing a list, costing it all up and then cleaning out the
debris – well I didn't do that but a nice young man did!
What to do? Well of course I am still waiting for the claim
forms. Haven’t you noticed if they want
money from you the demand is there within 24 hours, but if you want money from
them it could take weeks?
In the mean time I will slowly – as there isn’t much cash,
build it all up again. I so wish I had a
cellar, a very cold cellar to store more foods in without the freezer. I have
visions some nights of digging away as in the Great Escape, bit by bit, making
myself a cellar that only I know about, and storing all sorts of wonderful
things in it for a rainy day….. well such is the dream. The reality is that I have a freezer indoors
and a chest freezer that will be put back on when the new conservatory goes up.
(read second hand for that).
I can’t wait… well I guess I will have to. Roni is doing it for me. Roni was working for a family who were having
an extension on their house just where their conservatory was! It was going to the tip….. “Not so fast” says our frugal Roni, and for the
cost of foundations, bricks and bits I will, eventually, have a beautiful,
double glazed conservatory with a proper door J
and roof that doesn’t leak J. THEN I will put on the freezer. Until then I have a hole in the ground in
which a little moat is forming and of which the cats are most suspicious.
I keep telling myself it will be lovely when its done, and
it will….. but you know? I don’t like
transition. I try to hurry through that
phase as quickly as possible. Often it has led to me not getting jobs done as
well as perhaps I could, but the job was DONE.
However, this is a master class in patience and learning to enjoy the
process of transition. Well enjoy may be
a bit extreme, but at least I can learn to put up with it.
I have watched my mother in law go through a similar process
with her central heating. A much bigger
job and I am SO glad I don’t have that to go through…. But you know while it is
true that she too did not enjoy the transition period, she was much better at
going through the process than I. It led
me to think of all the times she has had to be patient in her life time, and how
so many women have waited for things over the years. Food to cook, plants to grow, husbands to
come back from the war, children to grow in the womb, be birthed and then grow
in the home….. (I mention women as I know more about them, but I am sure men
are good at waiting too… though to be fair, in my life, I don’t know many…..
lol.)
We put so much effort into our homes, and our work and we
forget that the effort we put into relationships is so much more
rewarding. The presence of my mother in
law in my home during the period of her central heating being done, has been a real gift, and revealed
surprising things to me. She may have
many periods of deep confusion and consequent fear, but she remembers the past
well. She remembers whole conversations,
and people’s histories and lineage. She
came up with all sorts of tales from her past.
Some we knew, others were new to us and had such poignancy that it made
one realise how much she has seen over the years. In her time she has been a strong woman used
to facing difficulties and adversity head on.
Not prone to self-absorbed introspection, she just got on with it as, in
her words “You just have to get on with it, and everything passes in the end.”
What a truth to live by.
/|\
No comments:
Post a Comment