Taking Smock of the Situation

17 Jan
SheWolffe trying on the smock before the embroidery started

On 1 June 2021 I joined the 2021 100 days project.

The 100 days project concept is simple: you choose a creative project, do it every single day for 100 days, and share your process on social using a memorable and relevant hashtag.

I had joined for the first time in 2020, during that first lockdown year. Mum was interested to join in too – her creative project was to make a small painting each day, mostly of something from the garden. She would take a photo of her painting each day and then email it to me and I then uploaded it on her Instagram account. For most of 2020 we were not allowed to see one another, and this creative act brought us closer together and gave Mum a positive focus each day during those long locked down lonely weeks.

Then in January 2021 I went to stay with Mum. Within days I was concerned that she wasn’t quite herself, and at the end of April she was diagnosed with mixed dementia.

As I started the #100daysproject I reflected that my life was now very different from previous years… I shared caring for Mum with my elder brother; our routine was that we stayed in Galloway with mum for 2 to 3 weeks at a time, and then swapped. Because of covid restrictions it was quite an isolated time, those first months of 2021.

Anyway back in the first weeks of January 2021 I found this fisherman’s smock which mum used to wear when she was sculpting her pottery animals. She hadn’t worn it for years and gifted it to me. I knew right then I wanted to embellish it, to embroider it with life.

Each embroidered element would connect to mum in some way. I had no idea if I had the skill to pull this off and create something more beautiful and meaningful than the smock itself, but each stitch would be so full of love for the remarkable woman who made me.

I recorded the progress on Instagram, initially posting every day (the 100 days are meant to be consecutive) but for various reasons my days were not consecutive, and I have also now recognised that this is a marathon, and not a 100 day sprint. So, two years later I still pick up the smock some days and stab the fabric. I still upload to Instagram each day I add stitches and if you want to see progress follow #TakingSmockOfTheSituation and #Smocktales on insta.

I started a fundraiser as a sideline of the project. Of course I did, I’m a fundraiser at heart and couldn’t help myself. So, if you are moved to contribute so no one in Scotland has to face dementia alone, please click here and support Alzheimers Scotland. I really appreciate your support, but more importantly so will so many others who are struggling to make sense of either their or a loved one’s dementia. It is a bewildering disease, for all of us.

I’ll add the backlog of slow stitching progress, and eventually I might catch up with myself and by then will have formed a regular blogging habit so you can see it (and my other adventures) in real time.

Edited to add blog posts relating to this story:

The following are coming soon…

  • Shelves half full
  • Lilo’s Apple Cake
  • Remembering Remembrance
  • Boostered

Trying to care for Mum as she developed dementia nearly broke me on a number of occasions. I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.

Alternatively you could buy me a coffee some time.

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Remembering Remembrance

14 Apr

On 14 November 2021 I wrote:

On Remembrance Sunday I used to take part in the parade at home, attending the church service and then marching up to the memorial.

When I first lived in London I went to the Cenotaph most years, I felt lost if I didn’t mark this day somehow, it’s in my blood. Back in the 80s there were far fewer people at the Cenotaph and most years I would stand just yards away from the royal party. I wasn’t there for them though, it was about family, about tradition, about giving gratitude to those who made such sacrifices.

This year I’m at home and watched the parade on telly, thinking mostly about some of Mum’s stories of the war… when she and Jen lay in the field in Hampshire, looking up at the planes (that was the Battle of Britain), of the time she was at boarding school in Helensburgh and her father’s ship dropped anchor and he came to pick her up. The headmistress was quite in a tizz at this handsome man in naval uniform evidently.

But mostly I think of memories themselves… mum is losing so many of hers and I feel a need to hold on to them, not to let anything go. So today I’ll start stitching this geranium which sits in her conservatory. I love the smell of geraniums.. we always had a couple of enormous fragranced ones in the porch at Fleet Street. And that smell is the smell of a happy childhood, of coming home.

No bonus pics today, but come back later and I might post some of my ancestors in uniform.

The geranium is all stitched now, and I love how it climbs up over the pocket of the smock. The actual geranium is gone. We managed to keep it alive for a year or so after Mum went into the care home… but had left it in her conservatory and through the winter it lost its will to live and that was that.

Mum was rarely sentimental about plants, or anything really. So she would have been quite ok about it being thrown out and making space for something new. I’m less good at this, and still live surrounded by too many things which should have been thrown out years ago, or at least months ago.

I’m sure I will write more another time about the table cloth and crockery that was only used on special occasions. And in all honesty special occasions really just meant Christmas and Hogmanay. And to this day I quite enjoy polishing silver, feeling that same frisson of excitement that we had as we presented our best selves over the Christmas season. Gleamy silver, shiny glassware and all our eyes glittering with excitement, reflecting the lights on the Christmas tree.

And yes, I still have most of the Christmas decorations too. Of course.

***

Thank you for reading this.

Mostly I blog about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, so if that might be your thing, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.

Do get in touch if you have any questions or comments – I love to hear from you my lovely readers.

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Lilo’s apple cake

8 Apr

On 25 October 2021 I wrote:

Let me tell you, Aunt Lilo’s apple cake is delicious and super easy to make. Try it warm with a wee dollop of Greek yogurt.

Although this feels like an Autumnal recipe, perhaps it will be just perfect for using up a couple of apples which are most definitely past their best. They’ve been lurking in our fruit bowl for just too long.

I feel a bit like those apples, as though I’ve been sitting around doing not very much for far too long. Perhaps my time to shine is about to come?

I’ve not been well for a few months, and it’s fair to say that our house move was not as straightforward as we might have wished. However, perhaps it’s the Spring in the air, but I really do think that I’m beginning to feel a whole lot better. I still can’t drive, due to the big blindspot I have in my left eye. And I still have a permanent headache. But honestly, this feels like good health compared with how I’ve felt for months.

Anyway, let’s go see what we can do with those slightly soft apples. And after that, there will be lots more wild garlic pesto to make. Such a good harvest this year. Top tip if you’re making wild garlic pesto – play about with it, make it how you like it. We made a batch with Bonnet goats cheese the other day and it was stunning. And we regularly add a chilli pepper to give it a bit of zizz.

***

Thank you for reading this.

Mostly I blog about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, so if that might be your thing, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.

Do get in touch if you have any questions or comments – I love to hear from you my lovely readers.

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There have been happier birthdays

6 Apr
Alix and Jennifer
Jennifer and Alix
Alix, Jennifer and their dog

Yesterday was Mum’s birthday. Another birthday we thought she might never reach.

Over a year ago we were told that she probably only had two or three weeks left to live. She had stopped eating – but it turned out that this was a temporary blip, and now there are days when carers proudly tell me how much Mum has gobbled down of her breakfast and lunch. I realise that this is ‘good’ in one sense and that they have achieved their goal of getting Mum to eat something. But there is part of me that always asks, ‘For why? Is that really for the best?’ And yet there is no other option, Mum is trapped in a life that she would hate; without any sentimentality she would wish there was a switch that could be flicked to end it. But life is not like that, so we take things at this pace, knowing that Mum is leaving us, slowly.

Mum has been bed-bound for about 2 years now. She sleeps often, or gazes into the distance, possibly out the window at the trees blowing in the wind across the road, possibly into the void. Her eyes, once as green as gooseberries, are now watery grey. Her right eye is always almost closed and looks inflamed and slightly puffy (a hangover from a botched operation years ago), so I focus on her left eye.

Until recently she would give me a great smile when I arrived, and she’d manage a few words. But recently she seems almost inert as she lies there. She occasionally follows me with her eye, but more often she just stares, unblinking, at nothingness.

Yesterday I opened the card I had just written and read it to her, showing her the illustration of balls of wool and knitting needles on the front. I read her a message from her wee sister in South Africa, and showed her the photograph of flowers from her garden. Mum barely responded, but I like to believe there was the glimmer of a smile which I hold in my heart.

There are so many other moments in her life I’d prefer to hold, but somehow I seem to have lost all of them for now.

Optimistically I assume I’ll find them again. In time.

The pictures at the top of this page are obviously from before I knew Mum – the one below is her as I know her now.

Mum slept as started this crochet project

***

Thank you for reading this.

Mostly I blog about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, so if that might be your thing, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.

Do get in touch if you have any questions or comments – I love to hear from you my lovely readers.

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Shelves half full

12 Mar

On 24 October 2021 I wrote:

I love these shelves full of jars.

They represent the efforts Past Loïs put in, to preserving the harvest although it’s not always my harvest (we’re not growing our own Seville oranges).

It’s so full of optimism – our cheese sandwiches will forever be improved with a dollop of chutney, there’ll always be a choice of marmalade or cinnamon apple jelly or jelly made from other garden fruits to have on hot buttered toast. My frangipane cakes will have a zing of plums in hooch.

So this afternoon I’ll be making more hot tomato chutney to make good use of my chillies. And because I’d hate a half empty shelf in October.

Future Loïs is always happy when Past Loïs fills the shelves

Where did I learn my joy of preserving the fruits of our harvests?

Mum made wee jars of mint jelly, rowan jelly and redcurrant jelly to have with roast meats, neither of which I have made successfully. And she made marmalade out of MaMade, a big tin of already processed oranges. Dad loved his marmalade on toast for breakfast.

We had a lovely old aluminium jeely pan, which seems to have disappeared, and was some years ago replaced by a modern stainless steel thing. I shall give the modern one to charity one day, as I have a lovely old-fashioned heavy bottomed jeely pan which I like to use when I’m making large quantities. My clearest memory of Mum’s old jeely pan was at Hogmanay when she would always make an enormous vat of pea and ham soup, to be served with buttered rolls in the early hours of the morning. The soup was ladled into large mugs. Mugs seemed a better option than bowls and spoons for our somewhat inebriated guests.

On the shelves under the stairs we always had a selection of jars of dodgy brownish-green goop, usually with a small label identifying what kind of chutney it was, with the month and year it was made (in my experience it was always some years ago). Mum’s shelves till contained many of these jars – did she just not eat chutney until it was vintage? Or did she have a chutney amnesty every 5 years when she’d throw out all the old ones? Anyway, I can’t be too rude about this trait as it is clearly inherited. You should see the boxes of jars of unidentifiable goop that has travelled to Galloway.

Making chutney in the jeely pan
Jeely pan after making damson jelly
Jars of Apple Chutney

Do let me know if you’d like to see more recipes again on this blog. For now, why don’t you have a wee look at my Wild Garlic Pesto vague instructions, and go and forage for some leaves for supper.

***

Thank you for reading this.

Mostly I blog about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, so if that might be your thing, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.

Do get in touch if you have any questions or comments – I love to hear from you my lovely readers.

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Warm and Durable

27 Jan

On 23 October 2021 I wrote:

Look at this beautiful thing.

I’ve been wanting to use bits of old blanket as part of a sewing project for a while. And although we have several old blankets at home I couldn’t bear to cut up the warmth and love, the memories of being snuggled up in them, the knowledge that my foremothers also snuggled into those same blankets as children.

Luckily Ebay provides! No doubt this blanket has kept others warm and safe, and at one level I can hardly bear to cut it up. But I will breathe new life into it, in fact many lives. Christmas gift making shall commence!

By October 2021 I was settling in to our new rhythm. Mum’s needs were being cared for in Fleet Valley Care Home, not 100 yards from where she had brought me and my brothers up, giving us the best of childhoods. And many of those caring for Mum were from this local community, a community which meant so much to Mum, which she was at the heart of for some years, when she was the Provost of the town (ok, she was chair of the Community Council, as it was after regionalisation, so although she was not technically Provost, she wore the Chain, and it looked mighty fine on her ample bosom!).

Talking of ample bosoms, Mum used to tell us the story of her Great Aunt Janey, who had a very small gullet (at this point in the story, Mum would always make a small coughing sound, to demonstrate the teeny tininess of that gullet). The small gullet was not the most memorable thing about Great Aunt Janey – she used to wear long ropes of beads, possibly pearls… and they would swing across her ample bosom. They would also land in a bowl of soup at the lunch table, and then continue to swing across those bosoms later, leaving a rainbow tideline of soup all across her bosoms.

Today I feel a bit as though my skull has its own tideline. I’ve been diagnosed with Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension. My translation of this is as follows:

Idiopathic = the medics don’t really have a fecking clue what is causing it

Intracranial = the bit between brain and skull

Hypertension = high pressure

In essence, my CerebroSpinal Fluid (CSF) is operating at high pressure. The lumbar puncture released it temporarily, but the amount that is removed during a lumbar puncture is only a fraction of what the body makes in a day, so it only relieves it for an incredibly short period.

The lumbar puncture felt like a very old school mechanical way to test for Intracranial Hypertension. They attached a basic pressure gauge to the needle they inserted into my Spinal Column. When I say a pressure gauge, I’m talking about a thing a bit like a mini barometer, or thermometer – a thin calibrated glass tube, which the fluid whooshes up until it stops and reaches ‘pressure’ and you read to see what the number is.

Ordinarily, they would expect it to reach pressure at about 11 for someone who has ‘normal’ CSF. The gauge goes up as far as 35. When the needle reached my spinal column, the CSF skooshed into it, and up the gauge all the way up to the top… so the nurse removed the gauge and replaced it with another. And the same happened again. And again. Eventually when they had removed a few wee bottles of CSF, my pressure settled at around 22.

So, that is what is causing my various symptoms at the moment.

I feel a bit like I am the sea. I can almost sense the waves lapping up, back and forth, inside of me, though I can’t really tell WHERE, there’s just a sense that I am made of waves, that perhaps I am an ocean. And then some days it feels as though there must be a really high tide, and that the sea is swelling and brewing for a storm. This creates quite the headache. Other days I feel as though I have sealegs, all wobbly and slightly unable to co-ordinate. And then there is the constant sense that some things are blurry – like there is seaspray all over my windows, and I need to give them a good clean.

I wonder if my CerebroSpinal Fluid is subject to the moon’s gravitational pull in the same way that the oceans are? Have I got a tidal force inside my head? Anyway, I’m already monitoring how it feels day to day, and I think I will include the phases of the moon in my data… Eventually I intend to use this data to create A Thing, possibly a cowl, possibly a blanket depending on how long I keep collating the information. Anyway, it will have colours and symbols and will be made from wool and will represent me beginning to live with this chronic condition. Well, a graph generated from an excel spreadsheet would be too easy wouldn’t it? And dull.

In other news, I still have some of that pink blanket. I made some oven gloves, using this pattern for the Bombazine Oven Mitt. It was a free pattern back in the day, but I’m pleased they are now charging for it. They took the time to create the pattern, and should get some benefit if people are making it. It’s a lovely pattern though – very easy and great for using up scraps of fabric. And woollen blankets.

Anyway, I hope that wherever you are this January you are feeling warm and durable. How is this year working out for you so far? I’ve just switched on the propagator, and plan to sow some chilli seeds later – I should have got them in a week or so ago, but I think we’ll be ok so long as they are in before the end of the month. The snowdrops are just beginning to peep out, telling me that life will go on, no matter how bleak it looks some days.

Remember that. The snowdrops know.

***

Thank you for reading this.

Mostly I blog about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, so if that might be your thing, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.

Finally, if it’s not too much to ask (I know, it is, apologies) I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with dementia more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.

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Sibling smiles

24 Jan

On 17 October 2021 I wrote:

With my big brother and big sister! Such joy to spend time with them this weekend.

I do love this picture, and will forever treasure it.

So much has happened since that picture was taken. That window in the background is now our bedroom window; we’ve been living here for about 3 months, and are in the process of purchasing the house, so that Mum can continue to pay her care costs.

And just over a month ago I started having funky vision. I say funky, making it sound quite fun. And it has not been fun. Though, in all honesty, initially I was not worried about it at all, believing it wasn’t serious and it would just go in the same way it had just arrived.

But troubling things don’t seem to just go in the same way that they just arrive.

After a trip to the optician followed by an emergency appointment with the eye consultant at the hospital, I was referred for an urgent brain CT scan (over Christmas and New Year). And then a follow up appointment with the eye consultant, followed by an urgent brain MRI scan and then an attempted urgent lumbar puncture (after nearly 8 hours in the day clinic and two consultants literally stabbing me in the back, they admitted that they didn’t have the skills and referred me to the anaesthetist team to carry out the procedure).

The MRI scan had revealed that I didn’t have ‘anything bonkers’ going on in my brain (according to a consultant as he was attempting to give me a lumbar puncture); the lumbar puncture revealed that the fluid around my brain is at considerably higher pressure than is normal, and this is the cause of the funky symptoms (vision loss, headaches, brain-like-soup, memory loss and who knows what else that I can’t currently remember clearly).

Anyway, I now have a diagnosis, and another appointment with the consultant at the eye clinic next week to discuss how we manage it going forward. My life will be different, but it always was going to be different… all our lives keep changing. How we respond to that change is what matters.

***

Thank you for reading this.

Mostly I blog about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, so if that might be your thing, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.

Finally, if it’s not too much to ask (I know, it is, apologies) I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with dementia more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.

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I really do love colour

15 Jan

On 8 October 2021 I posted:

I love colour.

I mentioned the other day to The Captain that I thought that deep teal blue might work on the wall in the bedroom.

So he painted. Then we bought fabric. And lampshades.

And now our bedroom looks different. Hurrah!

I still love these colours. But I don’t know if we’ll carry them through to our new home… yes, everything is seen through the prism of how we will live in our new home.

It’s interesting that for a long time I couldn’t imagine Mum and Dad’s house looking any different to how it always did. But over the last couple of years we’ve removed many bits of furniture and of art, and to be honest the place looked pretty shonky when we first moved in, piles of books everywhere, groupings of furniture, depending if it was for throwing out, for taking to a charity shop or for someone in the family. And so many boxes and boxes and boxes of dusty old books. Books which in my heart of hearts I know I will never ever read, but which seem so very familiar as they have always been on the shelves. Many are German and are inscribed to Dad, in the 1930s

Now, when I walk in the door, I can see the potential more than I can see what it used to be. And this feels deliciously hopeful and exciting. The Captain and I will be creating our own new home in this space. There might be aspects of Mum’s life woven in there, in the way her genes are part of my DNA, but the house will, eventually, be so very different.

In further evidence of my love of colour, but also of experimenting, I see that a few days after I posted the pic of the new colour palette for our bedroom I posted about a latest project:

Yesterday I used about a year’s supply of discarded (but saved) onion skins to dye a white shirt. I am now the owner of a shirt that looks like it’s been dipped in builder’s tea. And then you’ve dribbled more stronger tea here and there.

And because I love experimenting, I threw another shirt into the dye vat as soon as this one was out.

I threw both shirts out – they were hideous. I’ve stopped saving onion skins for the moment and have decided that home-dying is not my thing, not for now anyway. I’ll no doubt come back to it some day. When we were packing up to move house, I discovered a box of dye materials: natural madder, indigo dye, weld, all purchased during that first lockdown year, before I realised how Mum’s mind was blurring and how all our lives would change. Perhaps I should have thrown the whole box out, but it’s here with me in our new home, waiting for a day when colour is the thing that will nourish me. No idea where it is though, we have two rooms piled high with boxes, most with enigmatic labels like ‘Office Last Bits’ or ‘Craft and books’. But which craft? And which books? And where will I put them when I find out?

I hope 2024 is treating you well. It’s not being the best of starts to a year so far, but I’m taking the view that it can only get better from here on in. Let’s see, eh?

***

Thank you for reading this.

Mostly I blog about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, so if that might be your thing, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.

Finally, if it’s not too much to ask (I know, it is, apologies) I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.

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Here we go again…

26 Dec

I’ve been absent from here for a while. I just couldn’t write, nothing would come. My brain was frazzled and my fingers just sat limply on the keyboard, not knowing what to do, whereas usually I can’t quite keep up with them.

But mostly I didn’t even have time to sit at the keyboard and search for words, mostly I was packing and organising and throwing things out and not throwing enough things out and filling boxes, and taping up boxes and labelling boxes and then not labelling boxes and then carrying boxes, and more boxes. Then a bit of unpacking of some boxes. And then more packing and not labelling and carrying.

Basically we have not been very good at this house move thing. There have been some mitigating circumstances, which I won’t go into here, but suffice to say that it’s been something of a rollercoaster, not knowing from one week to the next if the house move would be on. or if it was, exactly when it would be. And then there were the weeks when it felt like becoming homeless could be a real possibility.

But here we are now, the day after another Christmas Day, and finally having time to reflect on things.

I visited mum yesterday. I walked along that brightly lit corridor, turned right and then saw that her door, the first one on the left was closed. This usually means that carers are in with her, so I gently knocked, but on getting no reply opened the door a fraction anyway.

The bed was empty, made but empty. And there was a gift bag on the end of it, with her room number written in wee letters at the top. A present from the home no doubt, to make sure all residents get something to open on Christmas Day. I had brought Mum nothing. And I feel no guilt, no shame about that, just a tinge of sadness, remembering how she would clap her hands with joy when opening something she loved. And recognising that this is something I do instinctively, have never realised it is Mum’s trait too. But nowadays, there would be no joy in receiving a gift, no clapping of those hands which mostly remain curled up under her blankets.

There were no staff about to ask, but I reckoned they had got Mum dressed and into her chair, to wheel her along to the dining room for a Christmas lunch. It was now a couple of hours after lunch would have finished. I walked back along the empty brightly lit corridor, and turned left at the end, towards the dining room. The doors were wide open, and the dining tables were mostly pushed aside. Set out in a semi circle in front of the most enormous television were four elderly women in wheelchairs, none of them paying much attention to the television, though not exactly asleep. Apart from Mum. There she was at the end of the semi circle, in her great big padded armchair on wheels, asleep, slightly off-kilter in her chair, leaning off to one side. I stroked her hair and kissed her head, called “Hello Mum” to her.. and before I had a chance to say “It’s Loïs” she opened her eyes and smiled her big gap-toothed smile, and slurred “L O I S”. I told her everyone was sending their love, and named her closest family. There was little recognition with this string of words, names of her most loved, now mostly not remembered.

Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty continued noisily in my background, the other residents stared into the middle distance. This did not feel like dignity, did not feel like a Christmas wish for anyone. But it’s reality. And Mum is comfortable, and generally peaceful and serene.

I told Mum that I was going home to make supper, but that tomorrow I’d come back and bring some homemade biscuits. She perked up at that, and managed to slur what sounded like “That’s my best thing to look forward to”. I left, telling her I love her, blowing her kisses. But she was already asleep again.

Today she was back snuggled up in bed when I got there, with my home made biscuits for her. She opened her eyes when I stroked her hair… but then gently closed them again and was back sleeping almost immediately. The sun was streaming into her room, creating tiny dancing rainbows as it caught the light of the crystal, a gift from my cousin Bushy. Mum was peaceful and calm, and really not interested in my biscuits, nor my gentle chatter about who was sending their love and hugs to her.

This. This is now Mum’s life. And I come to realise that although the umbilical cord was cut nearly 60 years ago, we are still connected. Through all the threads of our lives, through the choices we have made, through the values we hold, through the life we seek to live, through the people we love.

But now, as The Captain and I start living in what was for years her home, it is beginning to be easier to make it our own. What is ahead, who knows, though we do know that at some point Mum will no longer be with us. At that point will I feel differently about this house? The stuff still in it? Will I regret the things I threw out, sent to charity shops, gave away, burned in the fire? (My old chest of drawers from when I was a child made very good kindling). We’re making the best decisions that we can for now; and if I have regrets in the future, then I’ll deal with them then. But I am confident that I will never regret taking the 20 boxes of books that I would never read to the dump.

***

Thank you for reading this.

If you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.

Finally, if it’s not too much to ask (I know, it is, apologies) I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.

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Oh the treasures!

30 Oct

On 14 October 2021 I wrote:

My smock has wild strawberries! All to do now is to soak it to remove the plasticky stabilizer stuff that I use to transfer the design. And then onto the next design.

Your bonus pic today is a corner of our living room… the lamp base came from Dad’s parents in Germany.. I love how it seems the whole base is lit up from the inside when it’s just the reflected light from the gold inside the modern shade.

Mum’s parents returned to Scotland from South Africa when I was 12. Pickfords had packed up all their stuff and the whole house was full of tea chests. Each day after school for that first week I would come home via their house and would unpack a tea chest with Gran. Oh the treasures! This vase with the glads in it was one. We’ve always called it the majolica vase but I’m not certain it is. Mum gave it to me some years ago when she began dispersing her things.

The wine cooler was a gift to my parents on their silver wedding anniversary.

And the decor was created by The Captain… this is the drinks cupboard that he made, including the waney edged top which I love.

I’m just going to leave that there.

I have so much going on in my life just now, with more unhappiness than I thought it was possible for me to bear. And I discover that when all this is going on I kinda lose the ability to write anything about it at all. And there was me thinking that I could channel the negative emotions, and lay my vulnerability out there. I think because it impacts other people, it feels like I should not share, that I have to edit what I say, how I say it, have to curate this bit of my life on here. And if I feel unable to express things just as I feel them, then I am lost here.

I also have a few other priorities for my time at the moment, and so will focus my attention on the things that really have to be done. And then, when the time is right, I’ll come back to this. But there may not be many posts on here for a while.

***

Thank you for reading this.

If you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.

Finally, if it’s not too much to ask (I know, it is, apologies) I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.

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The luxury of pockets

23 Oct

On 12 October 2021 I wrote:

I love making these leaves, and I’m so amazed that they actually look like leaves!

I was less than pleased when MisoCat decided to walk across my lap as I was stabbing, and managed to pull one of the previous leaf’s threads with her sharp wee claws… but perhaps only I will ever notice.

I bought a remnant of luxury faux fur this weekend. It reminded me so much of the bonus pic chinchilla fur stole which belonged to my German grandmother. It’s the softest, most sumptuous thing, and it’s always felt so terribly glamorous to me. And, our sensible glamorous foremothers had pockets!

My intention is to make a tribute faux fur stole, with a bright satin lining. And pockets. Possibly even beautifully hand-smocked pockets, we’ll see.

I’ve still not done anything with that luxury faux fur, but it’s packed up in a crate and moved down to Mum’s house, where we hope to be living by Christmas. It’s been rather alarming seeing the amount of fabric and yarn that I have, waiting for me to have time to make them into something perfect. Mum used to say that we should not let perfect be the enemy of the good, and I think I have been more able to live by that maxim in recent years, when it has felt that very little can be anywhere near perfect, and actually that is all just fine. We have a pretty good life, and long may it continue.

But those pockets, are they not the most adorable things?

***

Thank you for reading this.

If you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last few years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.

Finally, if it’s not too much to ask (I know, it is, apologies) I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.

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