March 31, 2021
This past Saturday, Jennifer
headed off to purchase a new washing machine. She has lived with us now for
nearly two years, and we don’t ask her to pay rent. She is in charge, since the
pandemic, of going out to get our groceries, and she helps us a great deal doing
more things than I could possibly list. Because both David and I are considered
“disabled”, she receives a tax credit for being our “caregiver”, which she is
in a very real sense.
She made the decision that
since she got that nice tax return thanks to us, she would use a part of it to
get a new washer, because ours was most definitely on its last legs. And she
took her daddy to the big box appliance/home supply store with her. She didn’t
need the help nor any advice on which machine to get, but her daddy really
needed to get out. They’d decided to buy the machine and arrange for delivery;
then they were going to have breakfast out.
They had masks, and the
restaurants here abouts are restricted to the number of clients they can serve
at one time. I had no desire to go, but I was glad they were having some
father-daughter time. My job was to stay home with the animals. And that, my
friends, is another story.
Before he left, David joked
that he knew why our freezer had not yet been delivered. He figured it was on
that ship that at the time was stuck in the middle of the Suez Canal. I, of
course, rolled my eyes. I wondered after they left if they were going to swing
past the store where, in the first week of June of last year, we’d purchased that
as yet undelivered freezer. I really hoped that if they did, David wouldn’t be too
scathing in voicing his opinion of that store’s customer service.
He'd been getting beyond
impatient about the situation, and he admitted that he’s not certain anymore
that his “filter” is working. I didn’t tell him that it really hadn’t been
working well for some time. That didn’t seem to be a useful topic for
discussion between us because, of course, the eroding filter between thought
and speech isn’t anything that he can truly control.
He is the quintessential crotchety
old man.
After they’d been gone for almost
an hour, he sent me a text telling me that the store where they’d gone to get the
new washer had a 15 cubic foot freezer on hand, and it could be delivered
next week—it’s coming later today, actually.
I replied that was good, and after
they concluded the transaction to buy that, they needed to go to the original
store and cancel the order.
The new washer is electronic,
as is everything else these days. It has no center agitator and that means, I’m
told, that the washer will no longer go “out of balance” during its cycle. I
can’t tell you how many times, while David has been doing our laundry, that our
old machine has done that very thing. I’d hear it happen because as luck would
have it the washer is in the basement almost directly under where I am sitting
in my office.
When Jenny was doing her laundry
that would sometimes happen, too. Especially if there were blankets in the
machine. I worried the thing would break down one of the times it was hopping
down there in the basement.
Last November, before anyone even
thought about getting a new washer (we’d had our old one for more than 15
years) I purchased a baby monitor set from Amazon. One part was down in the
basement near the washer. The other was up stairs in her apartment—so that when
she was doing laundry early in the morning before I got out of bed, she would
hear when the thing began to “dance”.
The new washer arrived Sunday,
as promised. I even managed to get myself down into the basement to see this marvel
of modern technology—one that I will likely never operate. I was impressed by
all the flashing lights, and options. It’s a top loader, (no one here wants a
front loader). The lid is smoked glass, so you can see inside it. Apparently,
once it begins its cycle, the lid locks. I wondered if you could open it in
case of an emergency, but of course, I didn’t ask. I simply complemented our
daughter on her purchase and left her and her daddy to play with it.
I intend, all things being
equal, not to learn how to use the washer. I also don’t know how to use the vacuum
we currently have. Seriously. You see, vacuuming and laundry and household
garbage are the three things that David has as his household responsibilities. He
vacuums once a week—or, he’s supposed to. It stretches out to once every two
weeks, and the job consists of the small area rug and narrow short runner in
the living room, and the small area rug in my office. When he vacuums, he does
a good job and it takes him all of ten minutes.
Laundry? It’s laundry for just
the two of us, and he does that once every three weeks. The garbage is the most
intensive job he has, because the kitchen can needs to be emptied sometimes
every day and sometimes once every two days, and the collection by the town is weekly.
Oh, and he washes and rinses and sets the supper dishes into the drainboard,
too, on the nights that I cook supper.
No, I don’t want him to then
put the dishes away. I do that myself the following morning, so that I can set the
dishes that need rewashing into a stack to await the next load of sudsy hot
water in the sink. I also see no reason to point out these small lapses to the
man, either. He does what he can, and we each only know what we know.
So we’ll just keep that little
thing between us.
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
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