Day Seventy-five

Feest Isolation Days – 28 May

That feels a large number to me!  Seventy five is an anniversary of lockdown that I never thought I’d experience. Having never imagined a pandemic and lockdown would occur at all, wondering how long it would last never entered my mind either. Disaster movies have never been my thing, and although Ted Talks are, I missed Bill Gates warning.  As the days go by and we all more or less adjust to the new world we are in we continue to find the right ways of making it work for us. (Unless your Dominic Cummings – sorry couldn’t resist!)

Zoom! Who knew? Dinner parties, Pilates classes, yoga classes the kids.  A whole different world. Connecting but in a different way.

I could do with coming out of all of this soon but I don’t think we are finished just yet.  Leaving Lockdown is a scary prospect.  We are secure in our bubbles aren’t we?  What can we safely do outside? Where can we safely go? The Downs, I’m told by friends who look over them, are now packed, including with some dreadful Travellers.  These filthy folks give proper gypsy’s a bad name.  All in all, it’s somehow easier to stay at home!

Spending so much time at home has certainly made me think about homes and houses lately.  There have been so many of them! One particular story about the house I grew up in however, seems to “take the cake” a phrase my old Mom used! Fascinating to think that an expression from ancient Greece found its way to a tiny American town!  In Greece, somewhere around 400 B.C., winning something meant getting or taking the cake – somewhere in the 1800’s it became a more cynical expression. 

Terry, Alexander and I were visiting my sister in Pennsylvania many years ago and we all decided to have a trip back down memory lane to the old homestead.  My sister lives about an hour and a half’s drive from where we grew up, but after Mom died my father sold up and moved away…at first to live with my sister!  I digress.  We packed into the car and I no doubt bored the guys no end with my memories of when we did this and that, and how it all was when we were small. The sort of thing that people who love you listen to and nod and politely smile and hope the tales are soon finished. 

We pulled up in front of our old house and sat looking at the place, my sister and I swapping a few do you remember…stories.  A man saw us sitting there and after a time came outside to the car. We rolled down the window and said our friendly hello’s.  After all, this man now lived in our old house!

 “Can I help you folks?” He asked in that helpful American way and my sister and I smiled and one of us said, “Oh we’re the Blosicks.  We grew up in that house.”  We pointed knowingly to the place he’d just come from. 

“Well if you’re the Blosick girls, you didn’t live here.” He pointed, “You lived there.”  His hand directed us to the house next door and the whoops of laughter from the back seat of the car went on for days.  He was indeed right.  How could we have got that so wrong?  I think it has something to do with the fact that we both couldn’t wait to leave that house and that little burg behind us.  Neither one of us, to my knowledge, has passed that way since. 

Perhaps Mr. Cummings might make the same mistake when he visits his family home up in Durham next time.  He was worried about his eyesight.  Ours was more about lapsed memory.  Hmmm.  Maybe we do share something after all!

With love,

Kathy x