TM 235: Show us where you live.
235: Show us where you live.
The house is cleaner now than when Camilla first came home from Hampden. She has never liked cleaning but they can't really afford a maid any more, not with what they pay for Nana's medicines and doctors on top of all the other expenses. Property tax, a lot of that. They have someone come in once a week to do the really major scrubbing and that's it.
The last time she took Nana to a doctor she read a newspaper in the waiting room, and one of the articles talked about how the worsening economy has even the upper classes cutting corners. Going longer between hair touch-ups, that sort of thing. Selling pieces of art. The article quotes a woman -- unnamed, of course -- who says she has been selling the pieces of jewelry she had never worn often, because they won't be missed by her friends.
Camilla has never cared for housekeeping and there is clutter everywhere still, as there always has been, in Nana's house. At least the flowers are never past freshness, always new ones from the garden Nana always kept and Camilla now tends for her. Her life has narrowed to this single cloister, a convent of two. She keeps dust from collecting on the bric-a-brac and in the grooves of the wooden molding. It isn't hard to tidy up after two sedentary women but the dust is unrelenting in all seasons. With dustcloth in hand a line of Horace occurs to her: Pulvis et umbra sumus, we are dust and shadow.
And yes, she thinks, yes, we are.
Muse: Camilla Macaulay
Canon: Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Word count: 264
The house is cleaner now than when Camilla first came home from Hampden. She has never liked cleaning but they can't really afford a maid any more, not with what they pay for Nana's medicines and doctors on top of all the other expenses. Property tax, a lot of that. They have someone come in once a week to do the really major scrubbing and that's it.
The last time she took Nana to a doctor she read a newspaper in the waiting room, and one of the articles talked about how the worsening economy has even the upper classes cutting corners. Going longer between hair touch-ups, that sort of thing. Selling pieces of art. The article quotes a woman -- unnamed, of course -- who says she has been selling the pieces of jewelry she had never worn often, because they won't be missed by her friends.
Camilla has never cared for housekeeping and there is clutter everywhere still, as there always has been, in Nana's house. At least the flowers are never past freshness, always new ones from the garden Nana always kept and Camilla now tends for her. Her life has narrowed to this single cloister, a convent of two. She keeps dust from collecting on the bric-a-brac and in the grooves of the wooden molding. It isn't hard to tidy up after two sedentary women but the dust is unrelenting in all seasons. With dustcloth in hand a line of Horace occurs to her: Pulvis et umbra sumus, we are dust and shadow.
And yes, she thinks, yes, we are.
Muse: Camilla Macaulay
Canon: Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Word count: 264