Sad times and busy times

Mum, Jeni and me at Xmas 2024

 

It’s been just over four months since I last wrote a blog, but in some ways it feels much longer. I have tried, on several occasions, to put my thoughts and doings into words but nothing was forthcoming.

At the beginning of January my Mum had another fall which precipitated a slow brain bleed. I had stayed with her, as had become our usual habit, in the week between Christmas and New Year and then gone home on 2^nd January with the intention of returning the following weekend to help my sister redecorate the dining room and turn it into a downstairs bedroom. My sister and brother-in-law travelled down from Sheffield after Mum’s fall and I went back to cover on 4^th January. All seemed fine until the morning of 8^th when Mum suddenly collapsed. She had left a very detailed document, written in conjunction with her doctor, about her wishes in the event of something catastrophic happening and so the decision had been made for us really, which made us feel we were doing the correct thing in opting for palliative care only, with no further intervention.

Mum died on 11^th January at home with her family around her, just as she had wanted.

There was no funeral to arrange as Mum has left her body to medical science, but we felt the need to hold some sort of event for her friends and family to celebrate her life. As a family we have no strong religious beliefs, so we arranged a secular celebration in the form of an Afternoon Tea at a venue in the heart of the village that Mum had called home for over 60 years. When we went through Mum’s address book, to notify people of her death, we realised just how many friends she had made and ended up catering for 70 people! Not everyone managed to come but there were still between 55 and 60 people present and much laughter, tears and stories were shared during the afternoon.

Since then we, as a family, have been travelling to Cheltenham on odd weekends to start sorting the house out ready for it to go on the market. Although it was not the home that I and my siblings grew up in, it still feels odd to think that, once it sells, we will have no reason to return to the town of our birth ever again. This, I think, is one of the reasons for my mental struggle over the last few months: I am not grief-stricken by my Mum’s death as she was 96 and was finding living independently becoming more difficult, which she hated, plus she never had to go into a care home or hospital at the end. However, to me she felt like the glue that held the family together, the hub about which we rotated, the passer on of family news, both good and bad, and increasingly, the friend to whom I could confide most of my worries and aspirations, who always had good advice to give and with whom I could have a jolly good rant about the world in general! I feel a bit like a rudderless ship or one whose captain has suddenly left the bridge, leaving the junior officers in charge who aren’t quite sure what to do. It has thrown me more than I realised it would.

With no two-month stay with Mum to look forward to, I started gardening jobs for clients in late January and, when the weather allowed, it has been pretty much constant ever since occupying 3 or 4 mornings a week with regular clients and a few other times for some irregular clients who just wanted their gardens prepared for Spring. I don’t quite know what happened to my idea of retirement – I seem to be working harder than ever, but at least it keeps me fit. However, it does mean that work on my garden and house ideas has been slow and sporadic.

Towards the end of March, and during a dry spell, I had a chap with a mini digger come and do some major work in the garden – he graded the bank at the bottom of the garden, scraped  off a flat area for the chicken run, dug two planting holes for new fruit trees, graded another uneven area behind the shed and dug out a wildlife pond! So far I have managed to plant the two fruit trees – a Bramley apple and a Victoria plum, but have since acquired three more that now need planting . Jeni and I both bought trees on the same day from the same place – she bought me a Conference pear and a cherry tree for Mothers’ Day and I bought another Conference pear! I now have quite an orchard going on as there was an apple and pear tree already in situ when I moved in and I have planted two espaliered apple trees against the fence – one is a grafted tree from my friends Jo and James in Cornwall and is thought to be a Tamar variety called Mrs Bull’s, and the other is a grafted tree from the garden that I used to work in on the Shropshire/Welsh border – it is from an unknown tree there and Tony named it Cilrhiw Wassail, which I think is a great name. I also have a small cherry tree in a pot gifted to me by my best friend and next-door neighbour, Karen, a young crab apple in a pot gifted to me by another friend and a so-called bush cherry (I’m not convinced that such a thing exists) that I bought off the internet and also in a pot. All of these need to be planted in the ground at some point!

Jeni’s partner, Adrian, is building me a chicken run and I have pointed out that the clock is now ticking as my future hens have now hatched and are growing well – I must take a trip to Dundry to have a look. Hopefully, the run will be finished before the hens are due to arrive! There will be more about them in later blogs, I hope.

Back in the Autumn and inspired by the success of one of my gardening client’s tree hives, I ordered a beehive from a chap in Cornwall who advocates more natural bee keeping. On Easter Sunday Simon duly drove up from Cornwall, arriving at 9.00am, and installed my new hive. It is a particular type known as a Layens hive and is a more bee-friendly hive – I should be able to take a frame of honey for myself once a year, but the purpose is to give our important pollinators a home. The hive sits on a purpose-built stand within the orchard area and faces South – now all I need is a swarm of bees, but this seems to be the most difficult bit as, apparently, there is a long waiting list for swarms in this area. ☹

The ’wildlife pond’ is still just a hole in the ground as I need to go and buy a liner from a pond centre near Frome and I haven’t found the time to go there yet – another project that will have to wait for a bit longer. I suppose it’s good to have things to look forward to, but it’s frustrating as well.

In March I also had a new exterior oil-fired boiler installed as the existing one was old, although it worked well, but I had to heat an entire tank of water every day just for the needs of one person, which was not economical. The new one is a combi-boiler so it only heats the water I need on demand, which meant that the old tank could be removed from the airing cupboard in the hobby room and freed up a whole new storage area. I have now decorated the inside of the cupboard(!) and installed extra shelving so that even more things can be put away. I have made a promise to myself that nothing will get put in the loft – if I can’t find a home for it in the house or shed then it has to go!

I’m going to finish this blog here for the moment as it has taken me a while to write it, but I hope to post another blog shortly.