Limbo

If limbo was visiting hospitals all the time.

It’s been a year. I mean, I know it’s only the end of February, but I feel as though we’ve had a year’s worth of strife and grief already. As I write this my mother will have been in hospital for over a week: 4 days in the pronto soccorso (ER/A&E) while they tried to figure out why her haemoglobin levels were so low, and before they could get her onto a ward. It hasn’t been the ideal scenario for a 90 year old brand-new widow. But, it’s the local hospital so easy to get to, which is a blessing, and maybe by the time I am ready to publish, she will be back home.

More blessings: it has stopped raining incessantly, and even when it does it no longer rains inside my flat. This is not to say that the disaster of my falling-down ceiling is in any way improved, but at least the roof has been temporarily sealed. Also, my electricity has not gone off for at least a week, and I have more of it. This is a long saga but suffice it to say that after (10+) years of having to turn off the air conditioning (my only source of heat) every time I put the kettle or the oven on, and having to strategically choose which room to heat or cool at a time, I can now flick the switch on the kettle with nary a second thought.

And believe you me, I’m counting the blessings. I’m generally an everything will work out in the end kind of optimist, but I have certainly had days lately where I’ve just wanted to crawl inside a hole and hide, having carefully swaddled all my loved ones in cotton-wool and packed them in beside me. But there have always been things to be thankful for, and I don’t forget them.

When I’m tired or excessively busy or sick, I lose interest in what I’m wearing at an alarming rate, but what I notice is that in a proper crisis, I need my clothes to be my armour. I need to give the illusion that things are not falling apart outside as well as inside. Sometimes the best part of my day was choosing which socks to wear (that’s probably an exaggeration - in our darkest moments the family has managed to laugh about something most days, or at the very least appreciate each other. Or food. e’ve been very appreciative of food). In any case, I have been very grateful for the necessity of getting dressed.

I’ve been living off the clothes on the rack in my bedroom since mid-January, and although I’m now looking forward to a change, they have done me proud. I didn’t mean to put together quite such a compact capsule wardrobe, although I did think about choosing items that would work together. I ended up with three pairs of cords: black, cream and green, a pair of black and cream patterned trouser (all of these cropped), two pairs of jeans and three knitted dresses (black, green, burgundy) and chunky cashmere sweaters in blue, purple, pink and cream, a black aran sweater, plus a patterned shirt and two cardigans (dark red and navy). I mainly wore the same jewellery every day (a silver necklace and a silver chain with a lapis pendant, gold chain bracelet, mix of gold and silver rings), just occasionally changing one of three pairs of earrings. I wore different chelsea boots sometimes (burgundy, brown or black) and had fun with my socks.

Quite honestly, if anyone had suggested I could happily survive on 17 pieces of clothing, I’d have laughed in their face, but in reality I wore the shirt once, then didn’t wear it again because the ironing board was inaccessible and in any case I didn’t have time to iron, and I didn’t wear the navy cardigan because I thought it needed de-pilled and I didn’t have the headspace. Since I’ve had my spare room back, I’ve enjoyed wearing other things, but really the only reason I haven’t just stuck to the rack is because now that it’s not pouring with rain every day, it’s actually quite warm, and not really chunky cords and sweaters weather.