little ironies in life
Today, I set out to pack part of my mother's room within 2 hours... but I ended up using 6 hours with excluding the dinner break in between. Basically, I am making room for a maid, who is coming to take care of my father and the housework (hence me). I want to make sure she has a good sleeping arrangement, a cupboard for her clothes and barang-barang, as well as space on the dressing table to look at herself. There is a fan and a radio/cassette-player for her use too.
The irony of the whole packing experience is that exactly a year ago, my mother and I were doing the same thing: packing. We were moving from the old flat to the new flat. I helped her wrap some things and label certain others. There was an old picture from her school days. When she was packing it, she showed it to me as she reminisced about the past. I wrote down the event she recounted and the year it took place on a piece of paper wrapping the photo, and even dated my writing in case posterity did not see that the writing was done more than 40 years after the photo had been taken. Today I saw my own writing one year and 3 days ago. I didn't see today as it has turned out. I was planning on a happy settling in the new flat and more good years to come before her light snuffed out.
The unpacking after the initial move was more tedious than the packing, partly because there was not a hard deadline. So my mother only managed to undo the packing a mere 7 months ago. If she had known that she would be leaving in 3 months' time, she might not have bothered. Today, 4 months from her departure, I have just started to undo what she did.
Pack - unpack - pack... This is kind of like a microcosm of our lives, snails' lives.
[A silent decision was made a year ago during the packing: I would rather be a slug than a snail.]
The irony of the whole packing experience is that exactly a year ago, my mother and I were doing the same thing: packing. We were moving from the old flat to the new flat. I helped her wrap some things and label certain others. There was an old picture from her school days. When she was packing it, she showed it to me as she reminisced about the past. I wrote down the event she recounted and the year it took place on a piece of paper wrapping the photo, and even dated my writing in case posterity did not see that the writing was done more than 40 years after the photo had been taken. Today I saw my own writing one year and 3 days ago. I didn't see today as it has turned out. I was planning on a happy settling in the new flat and more good years to come before her light snuffed out.
The unpacking after the initial move was more tedious than the packing, partly because there was not a hard deadline. So my mother only managed to undo the packing a mere 7 months ago. If she had known that she would be leaving in 3 months' time, she might not have bothered. Today, 4 months from her departure, I have just started to undo what she did.
Pack - unpack - pack... This is kind of like a microcosm of our lives, snails' lives.
[A silent decision was made a year ago during the packing: I would rather be a slug than a snail.]