Author: Elisabeth

A chunk missing from the jigsaw puzzle

Today hopefully it’s my husband’s turn to come home from hospital. He’s been here following routine type surgery on an enlarged prostate and is recovering well. Though any person who’s undergone such treatment can tell you, it’s not pleasant.

We had hoped he’d be home after a day and night in hospital and when it stretched into two nights and days, fine, but yesterday when the doctor decided he wanted to observe twenty four hours of independent urinating and a check to see my husband was managing to empty his bladder fully, this was almost too much for him.

As well I went our for lunch with two of my sisters and came back to the hospital later than I’d planned.

The afternoon is the worst time of all in hospital. The afternoon after lunch drags and so my husband was cross with me and even more so when the lap top I’d bought for him to fiddle  on and from which to check  any unread emails proved cumbersome.

He needed to go through hoops to get into the hospital’s WiFi and in touch with his emails and there was only one unimportant email for him and everything else seemed cluttered with other people’s stuff, as in the lap top was not set up as my husband sets up his own fixed computer at home.

It all became too much and he fell into a sulk. With me.

He hates it when I fuss, but more so when I’m late or when I appear not to care and I’m caught tip toeing around him at such times, trying to tell myself this is not characteristic behaviour.

This is on account of being held passive in hospital for three days and nights feeling every drip of his personhood seep away especially when the nurses poke and prod and he must be ever so jolly and friendly with them.

I’m the only one who visits from home and outside. He’s told me not to bother others to come visit in hospital in the belief he’ll be home soon, but if I knew then what I know now it might have helped for him to have enjoyed the company of others. Hopefully, this morning he’ll get the all clear and can go home.

Last night I worked on a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle on my own. It was tedious fitting all the pieces face up on the table and then likewise, a job to find all the end and corner pieces in order to build the frame.

With giant jigsaw puzzles I prefer to begin with the frame and work my way in.

It gives a starting point to everything, to have a frame and thereafter the pieces tend to fall more readily into place. But as luck would have it we seem to be missing a few pieces from the frame, most notably the left hand corner.

It troubles me. This incomplete frame. This unfinished structure in which I must work.

It makes it hard, as if the image of an American countryside circa mid 1800s will seep out of the open corner and spill all over the floor unless I can corral the pieces into place on the board.

And so it is in life. Am I so bossy as my husband makes out, trying to get things into some sort of coherent shape so as to be able to go on working with all that messy emotion in the middle.

A frame helps to make sense of everything, just like my husband’s ill temper makes sense when I frame it in the context of three days and nights in hospital.

A frame to me therefore is like context.

Context needs to be recognised in order for us to work with all that happens in between.

Or am I just rationalising to try to make sense of my unease at this moment, waiting yet again to hear back after almost two months from yet another publisher who just might publish my book?

It’s endless this waiting and I cannot afford to go into a sulk over it.

I prepare myself for disappointment. I rehearse my grief even before it hits so that I can move on to keep on trying even if I give myself a rest from the endless search for the one who will publish my book.

A crazy fantasy I have that thereafter I can have a rest and simply write as I please, which I do anyhow, but somehow it feels as though not only a single piece but a great chunk of the corner of my jig saw is missing and it feels hazardous and hard to continue.

The nature of dust

Yesterday I cleaned out the vacuum cleaner, a Dyson, designed to remove dog and cat hair. I used the compressor in my husband’s workshop, this great long thin nozzle attached to a bulky machine that lets off the most ungodly groaning when in action.

The compressor blasts a wind so strong it can strip dust from within the body of the vacuum cleaner and from the surface of my hands in great swathes.

One of my daughters once wrote an essay on the nature of dust. Who’d have thought dust held such meaning as to oppress whole generations of women throughout the centuries, women who were given the endless and thankless task of removing it.

You strip the dust from the vacuum cleaner and with one or two more times around the rugs in the house, the vacuum cleaner is full again.

I went though a phase where I first discovered the satisfactions of cleaning out a house to within an inch of its life when I was young.

I lived with my then boyfriend, Paul, a gambler, and every Saturday he went off to the racetrack to win or lose the money we needed to live off. Mostly, he won enough to keep us afloat.

In those days, I was a student on a government allowance of $12 a week, hardly enough to feed us, let alone pay the rent.

Paul paid for everything in the last two years of my undergraduate life and in return I kept house.

It seemed a fair enough trade, especially as I reasoned one day I’d complete my studies, get a proper job and then it could be Paul’s turn to be kept, his turn to go back to study.

His turn to keep house.

This in the later stages of our time together became our shared dream after Paul came to realise the life of a professional gambler was not all it was cracked up to be, unless you had millions to play around with.

The big rollers could do it, the men of wealth, but not Paul.

His pockets did not extend to coverage of even small losses when they happened often enough. The power bill languished on the hall table unpaid and we worked in the dark.

In the meantime, I learned to live an unexpected life, a life of uncertainty when it came to money.

Cleaning was different. Cleaning I could control.

To this end, I splashed whole buckets of water, laced with bleach, across the patch of lino in our kitchen and watched the layers of filth slip off to reveal a pale green colour underneath.

Such bliss.

But the floorboards were tricky. They were coated with years of grime, this in our Black Rock home, the one Paul rented for a song.

It stood as a half house over the road from the beach and I didn’t realise it at the time, its owner was biding his time till he could find a decent buyer who would turn this house, half of which Paul and I occupied, into a luxurious block of flats overlooking the sea.

The place was ready for demolition. It held land value only.

When I think back on how much cleaning of that thankless place I went through, I’m awed by my sense of the waste, especially when I reconsider the endless process of cleaning and how mindless it became.

I realised this most clearly on a Saturday night all those years ago in the Black Rock half house when Paul announced he’d asked friends over.

Normally keen to enjoy visitors, I found that day I did not want them around.

They’d only make a mess of my pristine handiwork. They’d leave dirty dishes around the rooms and grit in the carpet. They’d mess up the toilet, which I had domesticated back to sparkling white porcelain.

After cleaning, I preferred to keep people in the house to a minimum. Even at the time, I considered there was something misplaced about wanting to keep people away in order to keep a house clean.

In time, I left Paul and most of my obsessive cleaning habits behind, though once a year, at Christmas time, I try to conduct a similar clean.

This year I’m hampered by my wrist. This year I’m slowed in my tracks. This year I have to leave the thankless dust to accumulate until next year, by which time I might realise the thanklessness of the task and pay someone else to do it for me, or even move to a smaller place, though that’s unlikely for several years to come.