Saturday

Today was Lesley’s last chance to get Dad’s small bedroom ready before the arrival of her sister and her eldest from several time zones away.

Lesley had taken the approach that the mountain of crap should be sorted prior to relocating what was worth keeping in the garage. I’m not sure I would’ve tackled it that way. As a hoarder myself I think I would’ve tried to keep the stacks as intact as possible and moved the lot out before just putting them back as is when the family had gone.

As it was, the various workshop tools, ‘useful’ spares and accessories, supplier catalogues, random odds and ends and so on were examined individually.

“What’s this Dad?”

The answer was, predictably, always one of the following:

• “Can’t remember. Keep it.”
• “Not sure but it looks useful. Keep it.”
• “{Obscure tool name made by a company that no longer exists and for which the replacement blades are no longer available}. Keep it.”
• “Oh! I was wondering where that had gone. That’s just the job for {some activity or task that he’d expressed no interest in doing for at least 20 years}. Keep it.

To add a little variety to the routine, he asked for the whereabouts of a particular item that had been dealt with during a previous session. It was one part of a two-part tool and he’d found the other half. Because he used an obscure name for an unusual tool, Lesley had no idea what he was talking about. He repeated the request just to make it clear that he thought she didn’t know what she was doing. Then Lesley noticed that some items had been put on the windowsill since she’d last been there. Among these items was the item he’d been asking about. He’d been fiddling about in the room on his own, found the item in question, put it to one side and then forgotten what he’d done. His go-to reaction, as always, was to blame someone else and because the ‘someone else’ who is there most often is Lesley she gets the blame. Regular readers may, rightly, get the impression that I don’t think much of him. This gaslighting and bullying isn’t down to his dementia – he’s always been like it – and it’s making Lesley’s life a misery. He knows he’s doing it too because he doesn’t try stunts like that when I’m there.

Consequently, I was much later getting to Mum than was ideal. She was awake, lucid, cheerful, chatty. It was likely that this would be Mum’s best day of the cycle.

“So have you been alright today Mum?”

“Yeah, not too bad. Better now you’re here beside me.”

She asked for a drink and also for me to read to her. She was more engaged with the story and she seemed more aware of what was going on around her than she’d been in a while.

After a couple of chapters she asked

“What time is it?”

“Quarter to 9”

“Is it!? Blimey. Time you got yourself home”

I didn’t need telling twice.

Bibliography

Tales from the Parish: 31 humorous short stories about community, family and village life, set in the English countryside

Kindle Edition

by Stefania Hartley

Author’s Note

My Mum is in a nursing home in a small village in the Thames Valley. The photo is not of the home. I used an AI image generator to give the reader some idea of the home she’s in.

All, some or maybe even none (you’ll never know!) of the names have been changed to protect privacy and hide real identities. If you think you recognise someone then let me know and I’ll edit the post or remove it entirely