Four Months....

One would think we would be well settled in by now, but I think the time it takes to be confident that you are at home with all your belongings is a relevant thing, completely proportionate to age.

You know where the knives and forks are kept, where the bed linens live and the very essential bathroom items are pretty well right to hand, and under control,  but occasionally you wonder about certain things and you vaguely remember having seen them, but was it here, in the house on the hill, or does your vision stretch right back to what shelf or cupboard housed them on the farm????

I have lost my knitting needle case, - the long. silver cylinder that my mother kept her knitting needles in and which I have used ever since she died.  I am relying on bits and pieces of needles that I pick up at the Bargain Centre to tide me over, but it MUST be somewhere, - perhaps in the weaving trailer which still picks up the sunshine and the wide stretch of valley up on the hill;  full of looms and yarn and forty years accumulation of weaving paraphernalia.  I must go and see, - maybe tomorrow....

I have reached the point where I feel the need to open each cupboard and drawer, empty them out, contemplate them, catalogue their contents in my mind and put them all back, duly noted.  They were so quickly filled up, those busy moving days, as the boxes came in and were emptied, put into drawers and on shelves.

Charles has spent a couple of these snowy mornings going through things that he swept into boxes at the last possible moment. and having a lovely time reminiscing and putting things safely away.  Will he remember where he put them?  Ah, there's the rub.....

The Christmas linens, - where are they now??  I have been following a backward path to when I last saw them, just before the big unsettling day arrived.  Still with some fragile things to pack and no packing paper available I can remember taking them off the shelf in the linen closet and wrapping things safely, - but what things?? Oh, that escapes me, but what I do know is that the tablecloths and napkins are not in the linen closet here, or in any other drawers or chests or basket or box.  So I continue my backward journey and perhaps in the middle of the night I will waken with an ancient Greek eureka moment, and the Christmas table will be set with the old familiar linens.

If not, I still have a couple of damask cloths, but such a devil to iron, - sigh.......

John Singleton Copley