Goosebumps

So I was at the car dealership this Monday past. It necessitated a long wait of 6 hours. In walking days I'd go off for a walk or run, there are some interesting shops around and a giant mall across the street and a beautiful lake with boardwalk nearby. Or if I had anywhere to go without spending 6 hours in the one spot, I would have taken one of their numerous shuttles all over the city.

So there I was, ensconced one might say. Or incarcerated as another might. I never mind as I come equipped with both book and device but the knitting was too enormous to drag, I'm in the final stages of a vast shawl.

So I read and try and tune out the endless large screen TV which broadcasts non-stop sports to the slack-jawed men in the front row. I wouldn't dare touch that channel and click it to Discovery (would you?). The coffee is good, there is fresh popcorn and a few boxes of Timbits.

A woman a few rows up gets up to look at a notice board on the wall. My heart stops. She looks just like my Helen who died in December 2014. I feel tears bounce into my eyes and a golfball hit my throat, the loss can be so keen at times. She was closer than a sister, there was nothing we wouldn't tell each other. I so miss that and Stranger Woman brings the loss into such sharp focus.

I pretend to read as she sits down again, now in the row in front of me but to the side. Her hair, her profile, her slender attractive body, even her eyes with that half-moon shape, so unusual (I'm so glad one of Helen's granddaughters inherited those extraordinary eyes).

As if she senses I'm looking at her, she turns and I smile at her, urging myself not to go weird, not to say anything about Helen.

We chat, we're the same age, we uncover life stories, children. Daisy lost her husband 22 years before but as he was an only child, she stepped up to the plate and took care of his mother who died at 94 this past December. She admitted the sacrifice, but had created a separate apartment for her mother-in-law (referred to as Missus) and had a helper come in once a day to do what was necessary in personal care. But Missus insisted that it was only Daisy who could cook for her. It tied her down terribly. I mentioned my favourite Aunt Daisy to her, who was the only other Daisy I'd known personally. We talked of our daughters and their opportunities and moved on to our singular granddaughters. Daisy'd been an entrepreneur up north but moved to the Avalon when her children needed more educational opportunities. She was as fascinated with my journey as I was with hers. We were together about 90 minutes.

Now here's the zinger.

She got up with many goodbyes and desires to see me again some time just as they were paging her one more time.

Her last name was Cassidy*.

As was Helen's.

*changed at last minute for protection of her privacy as a quick FB search found her so very easily.

A scent of laundry Part 1

Sometimes it’s the barest trace of scent in the air that can flood the heart with so many memories.

Today it was while I was doing the laundry for daughter and me. I opened a jar of new environmentally friendly laundry detergent and there she was. My beloved Aunt Daisy.

She had a back kitchen and a front kitchen. The back kitchen, all glass and overlooking the walled back garden was where the washing happened. And she had all the equipment for it long before anyone else. My aunt had married well, you see. And her husband literally adored her. So she only had to bat her eyes and anything her heart desired materialized. She had a car before women really drove in Ireland in the 1950s. And was always piling it up to the roof with kids and heading off to the strand.

Her voice was distinct - throaty and always full of laughter and the cigarettes that laid an angora fog on it. Her door was always open and neighbours and relatives poured in and out of it all day like it was Grand Central Station. Everyone called her Dais. Her hair was jet black and in my time it hung to her shoulders in a mass of curls. She made everything from making fancy Russian salads to smocking hand sewn viyella dresses look easy. There was always fresh baking and fancy confectionary sitting on her counters.

Her big Aga stove in the front kitchen with the skylight above it was always going, heating the water and pumping out teacakes and biscuits, fresh bread and roast meat and poultry.

My uncle got concerned she might be over working herself with five children to take care of and got her a maid but Dais didn’t know what to do with her so spent a few years chatting with her over endless cups of tea and listless hooverings and then got her married off to a nice boy who worked in the shop next door.

I never knew her to have a bad mood or lose her temper or complain when both her mother and his mother moved in with them. I often found myself having tea there along with twenty others, some related to me, more often not. Fairy cakes and triangle sandwiches would appear as if by magic. No one ever left her house hungry and her door, opening on a busy main road, was never locked.

As children, we played endless hide and seek all over the house as it had a front stairs and a back stairs. She never said anything about the noise that countless running and screaming children made pounding through her house. The only time she yelled was to tell us there was icecream in the back kitchen or a tray of chocolate biscuits out of the Aga. And we’d all stop what we were doing as if by magic and find her, a cigarette stuck on her lower lip, one eye shut for the smoke, and always serving us, snotty dirty little kids, on her best plates, urging us in that wonderful voice of hers to eat up as there was more.

There was always more at her house.

See Part 2 Here
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And now I'm off to catch up on some blogs...



In the words of my people:
Athbhliain Faoi Mhaise Dhaoibh, a chardai go leir!
Translation:
Have a wonderful new year, all my dear friends out there!
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Sunday Smatterings (2)

I am grateful for the pieces of work that come my way and supplement my meager pension.I am also grateful for my newly subsidized rent, geared to my total under-the-poverty-line income, but shocked on the application that one of the questions demands of applicants to state the "amount donated as gifts by family members and friends in subsidy." Seriously. I read it three times. Surely this is private?
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My very favourite aunt (I had 8 blood aunts and 2 aunts by marriage) in her heyday. This picture is circa 1940. Her name was Daisy and she was beautiful, vibrant, talented and artistic and married well. I wrote about her descent into alcoholism in two parts here.

Here's another photo, taken around the same time:

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The fog is rolling in again, it's been three days now. Can't tell you how much I love it and the sound of the foghorn warning the ships. This is a picture I took at my old house to give you an idea of how softly it drapes everything.

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Random. I love this photo I took one November sunset with the tracery of the trees and the sleeping boat and the lackadaisical water of winter. This was well before the madness and destruction took place next door and hundreds of trees were felled.

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Feel free to join me in Sunday Smatterings. No rules, just whatever takes your fancy in photos, song, memories, surroundings and link to your blog in comments.