Pea thief

I have had the most contented morning putting our chest of drawers back together.

It can’t go back in the bedroom yet, because we haven’t finished taking the floors up and painting stripes on the walls, but I thought that at least if all of our clothes were inside it, it would be an improvement on having them stacked up in toppling piles in the new kitchen-to-be.

It was the happiest time.

I wiped it all out carefully inside, and then gave it a last rub with lavender water to make it smell nice. You can still buy this from Boots online, but everybody else thinks you are mental when you try and explain what it is, because it is inexplicably not fashionable any more. My grandmother told me that I should always put some in my bath. It does not work quite as well with the shower but I like it anyway.

Then I rubbed beeswax over all the runners so that the drawers would slide in and out smoothly.

Then I cut sheets of brown paper. I ironed them with the lavender water and laid them carefully in the bottoms of the drawers.

I ironed the handkerchiefs as well. We have a moratorium on blowing our noses on tissues ever since they became a scarce commodity, and we just use our handkerchiefs these days. This has presented a small difficulty for Oliver, who has the mild eccentricity of preferring to blow his nose only on handkerchiefs made of royal blue silk with his name embroidered on the corner in gold thread. He has plenty of these, because I think there are many worse teenage choices that he could make, but they have been misfortunately left at school. I think he is probably using his sleeve at the moment.

I had stopped ironing handkerchiefs, and we have just been using scruffily crumpled ones, but today it seemed that it would be nice to put freshly scented crisply flat ones in the drawers.

I scented them with cologne, for variety.

I should have thrown away more of our clothes than I did, but we need scruffy clothes probably more often than we need tidy ones.

I replaced all of the peculiar treasures that live in the drawers underneath the clothes. There were creatively spelled cards sent by the children, and romantic ones, also rather creatively spelled, sent by Mark in our youth. There was a ring which had belonged to some long-dead relative of his, and a collection of children’s teeth, representing a fortune doled out by the Tooth Fairy over the years. There was an Inspirational Saying sent by a friend of mine, which I have always kept stuck to the side of the drawer so that I remember it when I am getting dressed, and a useful Very Sharp Knife, with a wooden handle, which lives in the corner of my underwear drawer, and which has surprised me by coming in handy quite often, who would have thought it?

I folded everything and put it away, and then spent the rest of the day opening and closing the drawers whenever I passed them, just in order to breathe the lovely smells of beeswax and lavender.

Also I am pleased to tell you that today I have solved a small mystery.

I went outside to empty the compost bin, and when I lifted the lid, something moved, so quickly that I couldn’t even tell what it was.

I stood and stared, nonplussed, for a moment or two, and after a minute, a little mouse stuck its head up and looked right back at me.

We inspected one another for a moment, before the mouse seized the remains of one of Oliver’s strawberries, and disappeared back down into the heap.

Our legume bed is next to the compost heap.

I know now why not a single pea has grown, despite several puzzled replantings.

They have been eaten by a rascally  Pea Thief.

Mark dug the compost heap out to see if he could find it, but he couldn’t. I was secretly a bit pleased about this, because it would not have been a good outcome for the mouse.

I have been robbed.

I am going to soak the next lot of seeds in paraffin.