Housewives’ Chat

Back in the spring I gave Mrs Leftfoot some of my spare tomato and pumpkin/marrow seedlings and for the past few weeks she has been inviting me over to view the resultant plants and fruits:  her daughter has delightfully named most of them.

For various reasons I haven’t been feeling up to visiting people.

I’ve always had trouble dropping off to sleep ever since I was a tiny child and the next sibling up (seven years older) whispered “One of these mornings you’ll wake up and find yourself dead”; I’ve forgotten the context but the effect lingers.

Fester’s cpap machine making buzzing (not in a good way) oboe noises all night hasn’t helped; nor has cats sleeping on my feet and head and wanting to be out at Godforsaken hours. 

Add to that waking up hot and sweaty due to humid sticky nights, dealing with the boys various behaviours, and natural anxiety during this present unpleasantness, and one has a recipe for sleep deprivation and feeling generally awful a lot of the time.

Admitting this to your friends worries them, but sometimes you have to.

I spent most of Friday reclining on the chaise longue getting rested and pulling myself together.

On Saturday morning I got this text from Mrs Leftfoot

“Hello.  We are here.  I am ironing.  If you were to visit I could stop ironing.”

There’s nothing like a mission of mercy to get me on my feet, so I replied

“I am not dressed, but I can be.”

So I showered, dressed, put on my shoes and hat and set off on foot.

At the end of the street Mrs No1 was putting some stuff in her garden recycling bin.

Mrs No1’s two girls are roughly the same age as my boys.  She was Thunderthighs’ one-to-one when he was in early years at our closest primary school, and was acutely aware her only qualification for this was being a childminder.  We have been friendly ever since.

Naturally I stopped for a chat about our offspring and things in general.

After a while we were joined by Mrs No6 with “Is this a union meeting or can anyone join in?”

So we three stood two metres apart and shared our feelings about the present unpleasantness.

We weren’t exactly depressed; more fed up with the fact that time is passing, nothing is progressing in our lives and nobody seems to have a handle on things. 

One of us has a terminally ill friend who she will probably never see in the flesh again.   

I don’t know how I would have coped had I not had those final hospital meetings with my dear friend Paula.  You can say goodbye in a letter or phone-call but it truly isn’t the same.

Just talking to some body different, from outside our households, and realising we all had similar feelings of restlessness and dissatisfaction helped.

After twenty minutes or so we broke up and I walked, briskly, the mile or so to chez Leftfoot where I had a delightful time being introduced to the various plants.

Mrs Leftfoot was a little put out to discover what she’d believed was a marrow is actually a pumpkin.  It’s wandering all over the garden and they’re having to step over it to get up the path to the greenhouse.   

 

We had intended to socially distance in the garden but the rain drove us in to the kitchen table where, like innumerable generations of women before us, we talked through all the issues facing us. 

 

You don’t always find the answers to your troubles there, but you can find solace and consolation.