Saturday, September 8

 

 

Today’s agenda revolved around visiting Irma’s sister in Veikkola. My ongoing coughing and wheezing prevented me from participating, because Marja remains highly susceptible to infections.

After breakfast Irma drove to Naa’s to collect her and they then drove to Kamppi to pick up Irma’s mother. Three generations of Sippola women then drove to Veikkola while I stayed at home with Sunshine.

I had promised to do all the Saturday cleaning, and so I did. Sunshine wandered into the garden before I got the vacuum cleaner out, and settled on a cushion on the terrace.

In the middle of the afternoon I accept that I will not leave the premises today. I go into the garden to take some peelings to the compost and find something to photograph. I pass the purple stick and it immediately fills me with memories. I go back inside for the iPad and return immediately to photograph it.

The stick became purple when I used it to stir some old paint in order to paint some old garden furniture. Auo immediately saved it and kept it for a variety of uses. She used it as a staff since, at the age of eight or nine, the stick stood taller than her.

She later used it as the central stick for a teepee that almost worked as she intended, before growing up rapidly and simply insisting that it had to stay as a relic of her childhood.

It still stands here, although the paint has started peeling off it.

Once I have run out of things to clean I will finish reading The Eyre Affair and decide that I liked it a lot. It still hadn’t run out of ideas by the time it ended.

Irma will arrive home shortly after 18:00 and we will eat spicy chicken and drink chilled water. We will watch an episode of Young Inspector Morse (that’s Endeavour for any British viewers) that we remembered seeing before. Neither of us could remember the end though so we got surprised all over again.

Set in 1967, it had a truly absurd and hysterical view of the effects and dangers of LSD, and occasionally I will find myself wondering whether this bothers me.

I will spend some of the rest of the time wondering why it has occurred to me to wonder this in the first place.

Like a circle in a circle, like a wheel within a wheel, I will think.

Or won’t.