Ethel always resists change - and understandably so - so we usually try to do "major" cleaning or moving of furniture when she's away. Visiting relatives for a week, every so often, for instance. But not this time.
"We're moving your cedar chest into the living room, and moving the sofa into your room," Mom tells Ethel.
"WHY YOU DOIN' THAT?!?" Ethel cries out in exasperation.
Why. Well, let me tell you why. We're doing this because we received some negative feedback from the recent visitors. "The place is filthy," they charge - it's cluttered, not filthy. "There's no place to sit," they charge - which isn't precisely true, but arguing the point is probably an exercise in futility. It's true enough. "The trash hasn't been taken out in a week!" they cry. OK, that's true.
Now, if it pleases the court - we're in the woods. There is no trash service, there is a pickup truck and a run to the dump. My truck has been down with a bad tire. Since the tire went flat, every day has either been too busy, too snowy, too rainy, or I've been sick. It's been a couple of weeks waiting on me to fix it, which I finally did this past weekend. While the truck has been out of service, though, I have been running the trash out to the back of the truck so it's loaded & ready to go once its tire is fixed, until the truck was full. At that point, the trash started backing up - but everything I throw away is "dry". There's no "wet" stuff in the trash to spoil, foul, smell, attract bugs, or such. It's trash, but it's pretty clean trash.
Since I've fixed the tire, it has been raining EVERY SINGLE DAY. Until today, and a trash run was already on the evening's agenda. It gripes me that "somebody" will think it happened because "they" said something. The trash run did not.
The moving of the furniture, though, did. Oh, they'll have places to sit.
"For often as they visit, they can sit on the cedar chest," Ethel grumps. I agree. It's the same thing I'd normally say. But this isn't normal, this is political.
"Oh, no, that isn't good enough," we tell Ethel. "They 'warned' us they were coming back to visit on Thursday. I'll be damned if they won't have a place to sit then."
About the seating arrangements - if "the company" had bothered to let us know they were stopping in, from out of state even, there might have been places to sit. As it is, people hardly ever visit. Ethel, despite my efforts to get her to sit out here in the living room, prefers to stay in bed. She's not sitting out here. There's no company sitting out here. We're in a single-wide trailer, so there's no closet space to speak of. If the seats aren't used for storage, it's just wasted space - in a college-freshman-pragmatic sort of way.
If "the company" is so concerned, and perhaps visited more often than once every couple of years, maybe regular seating would be maintained. Just saying.
I'm not saying there aren't housekeeping issues, there are. But I wake up every morning, medicate & feed Ethel, pack a lunch, go to a full-time job, come back, cook dinner, medicate and feed Ethel, do the dishes - by hand, there's no dishwasher here - put up the leftovers, and where I can I wedge in some online coursework for my certifications. If I don't vacuum often enough, excuse the fuck out of me.
Not to mention feeding myself, medicating my own HBP, and coming to terms with my new, CPAP machine for my new apnea diagnosis.
I appreciate that the uninvited, unannounced company is concerned for Ethel's well-being, but I don't see them around here pitching in on the chores, and they sure as hell didn't ask how full my daily schedule was before offering their opinion.
"They've upset you," Ethel says to Mom. "I don't like when people upset you, what they do to you they do to me."
"I'm not upset, Mom," Mom says to Ethel. "I'm pissed. There's a difference."
Damn straight.
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