Something very different happened today.
I have been very brave about it, and therefore you will probably hardly have noticed, but I have not been very well lately.
Whilst I have been unwell the happy home has fast deteriorated into an un-wiped, un-polished, uncared for hovel.
It has actually been that bad, if not worse. When you have dogs and a wood fire, bad smells and dust accumulate like interest on a forgotten payday loan. You have got to spend at least a little time every day picking things up and rinsing things clean.
Whilst I have been tottering about, coughing and shivering with all of the windows shut, the house has filled itself with a nasty fug of mould spores and dog grease and ash from the fire.
I am better than I was, but still wobbly and tearful and fragile. I can’t get up the stairs or pick something up off the floor without coughing.
Today a lady came in and cleaned everything for us.
She is a cleaner from one of the local hotels, and Mark bumped into her the other day. He gave her thirty quid and today she started at the top of the house and worked her way down.
Everything is gleaming.
I was actually weak with gratitude. It is horrible enough to be ill, but far, far worse to be ill in the middle of one’s own filth.
The bins are empty and the towels are fresh, and everything is beautiful. It is a relief beyond words.
Of course Mark can do cleaning perfectly well, but not whilst he is cutting firewood and building a conservatory. Today he was cutting firewood.
I would not have been cleaning today even if I had been in a full flush of rude health. Today was set aside for Other Things.
I had a troubling phone call last week from Number One Daughter who was having a small personal crisis.
To understand this thoroughly we need to turn the clock back thirty two years, when she was born in a terrible bloody emergency, two months before her time, and suffered the most appalling indignities. Needles were stuck in her tiny veins and a feeding tube poked painfully down her nose. Weighing hardly enough to make the scales dip, and covered in long, soft neonatal fur, she was whisked away from me before I even saw her, and bundled into a tank, under a harsh bright light to keep her from jaundice. The two of us thought we would die for a day or so, and then decided we wouldn’t, and eventually were reunited. Reunited in the sort of way where my wheelchair was parked next to her tank and I looked at her, that is.
I think these days we are rather better at understanding the emotional requirements of newly born infants and their novice mothers, but in those days basically we were just grateful not to be dead.
All the same, the whole adventure left both of us with our scars, mine still itches sometimes.
Her scar was more complicated.
When a baby is that premature it actually hurts them to be handled. They need all of the cuddling that a normal baby does, and the warmth and the safety, but it hurts their poor, unfinished little bodies to be touched.
We swaddled Number One Daughter in soft sheets to hold her.
I made her cot up with ancient cotton sheets that my grandmother had used in my father’s cot. They were worn to gentle softness, and she loved them.
She loved them so much that when she grew agile enough to escape from the cot, she took the sheet with her.
After a while, the sheet came with her most of the time.
Eventually Sheet came with her everywhere, as an important member of the family. The sort of family member that you really don’t want to leave behind, not unless you want another member of the family to be sobbing all the way there in the car.
The original Sheet did not last very long, being a worn bed sheet, cut down to become a cot sheet, and hence over fifty years old when she inherited it. My mother, cleverly, staved off disaster with a pretty pink quilt cover. This was also old and soft, because it had been on my bed as a child, and which, miraculously, felt right.
We quickly realised that it was inconvenient to drag an entire quilt cover behind a four year old, everywhere, in the mud, and the new Sheet was divided up into sections, which turned out to be very handy over the years, for when one was accidentally lost.
Sheet, in its various incarnations, was very useful to have around. Everybody’s tears, at some time or another, have been tenderly dabbed away by Sheet, although Number One Daughter’s reluctance to surrender it to the wash, and also its general usefulness for mopping up other leakages, made this a slightly risky procedure from a sanitary point of view.
Since then Sheet has travelled the world. It has climbed mountains in Turkey and been tucked into body armour in gunfights in Afghanistan. It has sunned itself on the beaches of Dubai and hidden under sweaty fitness kit in Madrid. It has seen Mickey Mouse and ridden on camels, and it has waited, anxiously, whilst Number One Daughter gave birth to her own miracle of new life, one which weighed, incidentally, more than twice her own weight at the same moment.
When Number One Daughter rang this weekend to tell me, sadly, that Sheet had somehow been lost, it was such a shocking tragedy that I almost dragged myself from my sickbed to go and help her look.
Of course the lost Sheet of today is not the quilt-cover Son Of Sheet. It is a few small fragments of Son Of Sheet, carefully sewn on to a larger, soft sheet, to preserve their last, but still loved, frail little lives for a short while longer.
Number One Daughter had a few more fragments left, she thought.
They arrived today by Special Delivery. This was my job for the day.
They were indeed tiny fragments, frayed and rubbed and weary. They were faded and threadbare, and barely had any weight in my hands at all, but they were still Sheet, and part of all of our history.
I pressed them flat, and washed them, and pressed them again, carefully, trying to preserve as much of them as I could.
Mark and Oliver watched anxiously.
I turned them and hemmed them, and eventually stitched them into their new home, a bright piece of fabric much the same colour as Sheet had been, in its youth.
When I had done we wrapped them up carefully, and Oliver, anxious to help, rushed up to the post office so that they might get there tomorrow.
Sheet lives on.
