17.07.2023 Taking stock. [Again!]

 ~o~

 Monday 17th 15C/60F. Overcast and windy again. Rain or showers are expected all day and windy again. It is already raining. Heavily enough to be easily visible against the dark background of the garden trees. 

 Upstairs temperatures have remained stable at 23C/73F. Which I find comfortable for sitting at the computer. Sleeping under the empty duvet cover in a T-shirt has been fine too. Fortunately the record heat wave over southern Europe hasn't reached this far north. 

 With 1/3 of Americans under a hazardous heat warning nobody can still deny global warming. Heat, rainfall and flooding records are falling everywhere. China is breaking temperature records. As is Japan.

 It is already far too late to hold the earth at the temperature levels of the empty promises by our so-called leaders. The oceans have run out of heat storage. Greenland ice and the mountain glaciers are vanishing. Even Antarctica is losing huge volumes of ice. When they originally though it was invulnerable.

 7.00 Due to the risk of higher temperatures reaching here I have plans to get my heavy bed downstairs. I shall place the folding sponge mattress against the cupboard at the bottom of the stairs. That will avoid a catastrophic impact if I can't hold the weight of the bed base. Hitting the cabinet with a heavy bed would not be kind to the contents!

 Emptying the tall cupboard/display cabinet with my wife's china cat and some of her teapot collection would be difficult. Not to mention time consuming. It doesn't look like it but there must be a hundred cats hidden in there. Many more carefully wrapped and boxed upstairs. The dangling cables are network cables to the upstairs router. I had to un-clip them to paint the chimney. The clips were never replaced.

Being brutally realistic, removal of the entire cabinet and its contents would be the most sensible option. If only to allow better access to the steep stairs. The cabinet has/had no other purpose and is made of very dark wood. Making the contents very difficult to see. It also makes that end of the L-shaped lounge very dark indeed.

 The cabinet came from a huge flea market with occasional pretensions to antikism. Probably originally made in India and sold at dirt cheap, furniture stores. It had pretensions of grandeur when we found it. The drawers work very poorly and the hinges are broken on one door in the base. I haven't dusted it. Such activities are utterly meaningless in my present state of mind. Where almost everything is meaningless and apathy reigns uncontested.

 I should really pack the entire collection in newspaper and box it up. Then I can be rid of yet another unwanted cupboard. Should I decide to display her collection in future. I can use modern, glass display cabinets in white. Probably from IKEA. Possibly with interior diode lighting. Or, the storage boxes can be added to all of the rest. Stored away, for some increasingly meaningless, future decision. For somebody else to make after my own demise. Or my being sentenced to death row in an old people's home.

As more time passes. Following my wife's sudden and unexpected death to cancer. The less hold her things have on me. Her absence still seems as completely unreal as was her presence to me now. 

 They say that time is the great healer. They must be right. Yet I am still kept awake by the countless memories of her. Dreams twisted into surreal nightmares. Still wake me up all the time. 

 The left, kitchen windowsill is still decorated in my wife's [now dusty] blue glass collection. The junk filled greenhouse lies beyond. The curtains which covered the greenhouse walls for decades are long gone. I ripped them down as soon as I was finally free to do so. They had already disintegrated from UV and the soaring heat of summer. 

 That was before we invested in horticultural quality shade netting. Alas too late for my wife to enjoy it. Both end doors were inaccessible due to her storage out there. It was impossible to take more than a few steps. With white tarpaulins hanging down from the ceiling to crouching height. The floor housed several bamboo garden suites which were never used.

 Meanwhile, I find the connection to her most valued things ever more tenuous. Why am I keeping these things when they have no other meaning to me? Than Her ownership while she was here. They will not bring Her back. I have no need of such things to remind me of her. I think of her all the time. Though I was never allowed to touch her collection. Nor any of the overburden of furniture its storage demanded. There was so little room for anything to be put on display. Or even for us to move around the house.

 Most of her excess furniture has gone. I donated huge quantities of her "stuff" to charity. Other items went to the recycling yard. Endless trailer loads. Getting rid of modestly valuable items to recoup their usually modest, initial cost is very hard work. There is no Danish eBay. The small ads websites are fixed price. There is no competitive upward bidding on prices. Most of her collection was bought over many years. From charity shops and flea markets. She had a good eye and there is very little real junk. 

  My wife's collection of shells, fossils and "interesting" stones. Which she found while gardening over decades. These decorated the right windowsill beyond the kitchen sink. The same window which was covered in a polythene tarpaulin for decades. Denying her a view of her front garden. Where she spent so much time. It also made the kitchen dark.

 I had to move the collection to allow access to fight a recent ant invasion. It is temporarily laid it out for the photo on the hotplate. What does one do with such a collection? Find a big, glass, sweet jar with a lid? Mix it all together and store it away?

 My wife never threw anything useful or pretty away. Not if it could be helped. She practiced recycling down to the smallest scale. Before anybody else thought much about it. Nothing useful ever went to waste. Usually it could be found a purpose in gardening. Or one of her other interests. Or mine. 

 The result was a house full of her "belongings." No matter how trivial. Which had suddenly and completely lost its purpose. My problem was making sense of it all. While slowly breaking the bond of deeply ingrained responsibility and attachment by association. While simultaneously suffering from the endless depression at her passing.

 8.00 Heavy rain and thunder. I was going to go for a walk in my winter rain jacket.

9.30 56F. It is still raining heavily. Still rumbles of thunder. Which is why today's blog post is growing ever longer. It's now a battle between boredom, cabin fever and actually doing something useful. Whatever that means.

 13.00 20C/68F Lunch over. I had a short walk in wind and sunshine. Just to see the progress on the drive earthworks. The big excavator was busy spreading soil ever wider near the road. The new build, planning permit for the field, is for a horse pasture. Raising the drive was not included. Nor can I find any reference to it on the council's website. Not that I care about that aspect of the work.

 I just hope the very real, earth dam, they have built. To support the raised drive. Doesn't lead to flooding. There is a small hill or ridge rising to the east from the rear of my garden. Which must inevitably drain down into the now, fully enclosed, marshy field. Whether the newly formed plastic drainpipe is enough I shall soon find out.

 My house is about a couple of meters above this sunken back field. So there is probably little risk of flooding.  Except on the field itself. Which may become a shallow lake after prolonged, heavy rain. Just as it did in the past. When we first moved here. The water table in winter is very high. As I know from the drainage excavations I dug by hand. To connect to the new, local sewage system.

 After a long, lazy day doing nothing: Dinner was fish in batter with chips. Yet again I forgot to take any pictures. The fish was very disappointing. There was mention of cod on the packaging but there was no discernible taste.

~o~