Housekeeper's Diary
Today my Dad said goodbye to his beloved little baby-dog, Chase, a glossy black spaniel who worshipped him in the same way Helen and I do and who was adored so very gently in return by Dad. The two becoming inseparable during the few short years they shared.
Some days are tinged with the kind of little sorrows we simply cannot predict. aren’t they? Sadness that isn’t necessarily ours, but which tinges the day blue and leaves us all feeling tender regardless. Here the house is riot of laundry. The chance of rain too unpredictable to risk the clothesline and so the too many to count bags full of laundry that Finley brought home are stacked in the faraway room as I work through them one by one, secretly binning anything that looks like it may have been trampled by horses or dragged through puddles in the absolute certainty that my daft child would never be able to tell me what he owned and what he didn’t and that it is entirely possible I am diligently laundering the wardrobes of his equally bewildered housemates.
Upstairs, Finley and a friend who stayed over, are fast asleep and I creep around my own house like the landlady of a seaside B&B, readying the public quarters of my house for their attendance at my breakfast table at twelve in the afternoon and readying myself for what they will say when they finally make it downstairs. For I have, overnight, transformed from all year round milky skinned maiden to oompa loompa in the swipe of a new bottle of tan it seems I have layered rather too liberally. Oh yes. I am ORANGE. So very orange that when I took my daily peek at my morning face in the bathroom cabinet, I almost recoiled in fright, and frankly that’s not a good start to what is already a bad day in anybody’s book.
Despite it all, I am moving gently through the day. Ordering cardboard boxes to pack that which Finley brought home in bin bags and overflowing Aldi carrier bags into some semblance of order, and still chopping at the relentless ivy growing over the stone outhouse, in bursts of energy I buffer with rosehip tea and bouts of staring in to space that create vacuums in my head I fill with wandering possibility, mad ideas and too much doubt.
When I first came to view this house there was a long rambling, well-established garden with crumbly stone pathways to a secret lawn and old walls surrounding it. But in the time between agreeing the lease and our moving in, the garden was unexpectedly steam-rollered and in the place of a lawn was the foundations for a modern house overlooking what was now a mess of turf, concrete flags and fence panels. I was heartbroken but too excited about the house to consider the degree to which the house in the garden would overlook ours, and in the end it didn’t matter for a business rented the house and until recently, when it was sold again, nobody lived there. But now a young, busy couple have moved in and the security lights are on and off through the night and even the shortest of wanders through the garden make me feel as if they may just be looking over astonished by the eccentric oompa loompa randomly hacking at foliage hither and thither, in bare feet and wild up-do.
It is time to move on. Though I know not yet, where or how, I am more a stranger within these four walls by the day. For as I have said before, the relationship between ourselves and our homes is a marriage and when we fall out of love, no amount of candlelit seduction can restore what is lost, and what is gone will not be coaxed back with empty promises of commitment to homemaking the heck of all that no longer resonates with a heart already moved on. This then is mulling time. The space in between the here and now and what will be and it is so hard. Because I don’t do well not knowing. I don’t like the liminal. The corridors between rooms are places I feel bewildered in. Waiting with no definitive end a kind of torture I manage by existing in a kind of limbo I rage against in silence.
Now. Ben’s holiday extended by five days so I’m missing his beautiful chaos. The picking of the scabs mutual anxiety will not let us heal yet. My heart is not here though, but in Devon with my Dad, whose voice on the phone is croaky with sadness, and who I can do nothing at all for today. So a tub of cottage cheese for lunch, liberally sprinkled with turmeric and pink salt, and a son who eventually comes down the stairs with a terrible case of the “fatface” that has been a marker of his exhaustion since he was tiny. I see his friend on her way and feed large child with teeny slithers of cheese on toast he melts in his mouth in lieu of chewing, and keep him topped up in tea that isn’t as good as the cups he takes an age to make for me, and that are surely the result of some sort of sorcery.
A tender day. Father John Misty serenading me “When the last time was our last time, if only then I knew the last time was our last time, would’ve told you that the last time comes too soon” as I fold t-shirts and defluff the tumble dryer and feed the cat and write and read (this) and tell myself that after the death of all things, life carries on. And it is but the nature of things and our job is not to rail against it but to learn to accept it with all the peace we can muster, or else sorrow or bitterness have a tendency to cup us by the chin.
Yes. A tender day. A day to acknowledge that being human is complicated. That we have no choice but to do what is right by beautiful dogs who trust us with every atom in their furry bodies, even when it is necessary to make the most terrible of all decisions on their behalf. That it always serves us to know that there are no givens. No absolute tomorows. That we can fall out of love with houses and humans in a heartbeat and there is no going back, no point in mourning what we do not, cannot, don’t have to feel. We simply have to move on with grace. And that some days you wake up and you have turned orange and no amount of scrubbing it away will work
This then is for Chase. You young pup, were loved by someone very special indeed. May heaven be filled with shoes as a thank you for loving my Dad as fiercely as you did.