The woman coming to measure living room suite for slip covers was
expected at 11:00. Stella had sent me an
e-mail saying that she wanted to start bang on time. Usually we have a bit of chat before setting
to.
‘My nephew’s visit went well.
He and his family had just moved and were still dealing with boxes and
disorder of their own.’
‘Your house is now well within what anyone could have while
digesting boxes of stuff.’
‘I want to have another go at the bedroom again and I have something
to show you.’
We went up to her bedroom and she opened the door of the en-suite
bathroom which as far as I knew had been the only untouched room. She had cleared it herself.’
‘I kept six of those little wine boxes we had been using for paper
so I could divide the bathroom junk into manageable bits. Like you’ve told me, it’s not so daunting,
just doing one box at a time. I’ve even taken a bath in the bath tub instead of
a shower in the guest bathroom.’
The biggest surprise was to come.
At the end of Stella’s bed were some of the boxes of videos we had made
early on. Stella had brought a roll of black bags which she handed to
me.
‘I want the tapes bagged up so I can throw them away.’
My jaw dropped. Only the
other day Beverly had said to me, that at some point the diary would come to an
end. She asked me when I thought that
would be. I said when the old videos get
thrown away. I told Stella. She laughed.
When I was ready to start taking the bags downstairs, I asked Stella
if she wanted me to put them in the kitchen by the backdoor which is where
we’ve put bags of rubbish in the past.
There is no where outside to keep the rubbish between the times.
‘No, she said. I like the way
the kitchen looks now. I don’t want a
bunch of black bags cluttering it
up. It matters to me now the rooms that
I’m living in. I don’t mind that we’ve
got a ‘box room’ because I’m not using that room on a daily basis. That’s why
we are doing my bedroom. There are those
boxes of videos in the box room and I do want to get rid of them, but I really
want to have my bedroom back again.’
Following Stella’s
instructions, I put the black bags went in the spare room until rubbish day
along with the out-dated computer that had been sitting in the middle of the
bedroom floor. Once all that stuff was
out of the bedroom, Stella pulled out the hoover and started vacuuming the now
exposed floor.
We had a very nice lunch to celebrate the success of the year and
came back just to tidy up.
‘I’ve gone back and done the various quizzes on the website and I
can actually measure how much progress there has been. As bad as it was, I was always clean and I
always had clean clothes to wear. That
was something to hang onto.’
Stella had fresh flowers in vases in both the sitting room and the
kitchen. She had told me that once upon
a time she used to have fresh flowers all the time. It made me smile that she now had them again.
‘I know we were planning to do the books when we finished the paper, but I’ve been thinking about how we could do the sorting and I’d like to start today. I’ve typed up a list of where I want the subject piles to be. My printer is broken so I’ve put up post-it notes around the house.’
