Friday

Friday

We deliberately gave ourselves a slow day today to get over the journey to Mum’s house yesterday. Our standard slow days are very slow but even by that standard it was a very slow day. Even The Dog took the day slowly. We restricted ourselves to gentle, local walks. I don’t know what it is about clearing our parents’ houses that’s so draining. The physical tiredness I can understand. What I can’t understand is the mental sluggishness it causes. At least we’ve learned enough to go easy on ourselves for a day or two afterwards now.

The butterflies were out in force again today. The Jersey Tiger Moths are still busy and we’re getting quite used to seeing them now even though I’d never seen one before last week. Today’s highlight was what Google Lens told me was a Spotted Wood. Never seen one of them before either.

I used to be a real entomology nerd. I bought loads of field guides when I was a kid and I still have them in the attic. But those books have got well out of date in the half century since I bought them. Species that were once commonplace have gone and species I’ve never seen or even heard of before are here. I’ve only seen one or two Red Admirals this year and I can’t remember the last time I saw a Small Tortoiseshell. They were everywhere when I was growing up. No patch of nettles escaped having a cluster of black and yellow caterpillars inside a silken tent. Nettles grow unchecked now.

When we got back from the morning walk we set about sorting through the artifacts we’d brought back from Mum’s house. Starting on another room meant finding another trove of greeting cards. Two big bundles in fact. A chance find of a Woolworths receipt in one of them gave me the vintage. The mentions of sadness at Dad’s declining health gave me a clue as to the timeframe these bundles covered. It was the receipt that disturbed me. The date told me that Mum had started to lose the plot when she was the age that I am now.

Not being at either parent’s house more then once a week makes things awkward. We can’t easily get to either one early enough to put the bins out or stay late enough to bring them back in once the rubbish and recycling has been collected. Neither house has a charity shop you can park outside to dump stuff at. We don’t feel we can do anything other than bring everything back here. And as they both had the habit of storing sentimental stuff with documents that were actually important we have to go through everything with a fine-toothed comb. I was getting to the end of a batch when there was a cry from another room.

“Nick!? Come and have a look at this! I think you’d better sort this one out.”

It was a shoe box. A Clark’s shoe box. A box for a child’s shoes.

There were a couple of wallets, a photo that was faded beyond identification, a badly worn old penny, a book of love poetry in a scented box… And a book – a collection of Dickens’ Christmas stories.

The inscription in the book said that it had been presented as a prize for good behaviour and good attendance at school to Mum’s dad. The date was Christmas 1909.