Things found in the closet
Oct. 28th, 2006 03:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienSo ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
brisingamen inspired me, and I'm trying to purge my overcrowded clothes closet.
There are a couple of British-summer jackets in there that I haven't worn in years because they badly need dry cleaning and taking things to be dry-cleaned doesn't fit into my routine anywhere. By now they're probably past saving anyway, and they're twelve and twenty years old respectively. I reached into the pocket of the twenty-year-old one, an oatmeal-coloured blazer that I liked enough to be able to keep wearing for years even though I wore it to my father's funeral when it was nearly new, and found a wrapped hard candy, a little green ball in a twist of cellophane.
That has to date back to the London days; I'm almost certain that it came from the elderly couple who befriended me then, who had me to lunch most Sundays and gave me a bed for the night after Bible class for a couple of years. They were amazing people; they'd gone from inner-city poverty to a nice house in the suburbs and spent the rest of their lives sharing it with the less fortunate -- the handicapped, the mentally ill, the lonely young career women. Gwen had a sharp tongue, an earthy wit and a deep, thoughtful faith; they enjoyed the good things in life and shared them freely. I fled to them when I was shocked and shaky after my handbag was snatched one night in 1996, and they fed and spoiled me until I was ready to face the world again. And they kept a bag of hard candy in the car for the long drive from our Forest Hill place of worship to their home on the Kentish fringes of London.
I sold them (they insisted on paying for it) my old PC before I left London. John had a hard time with it at first -- it isn't easy for an eighty-year-old to learn to use a mouse -- but he must have mastered it, because he sent me a printed letter a while later.
They died a couple of years after I moved here, and I still miss them.
brisingamen inspired me, and I'm trying to purge my overcrowded clothes closet. There are a couple of British-summer jackets in there that I haven't worn in years because they badly need dry cleaning and taking things to be dry-cleaned doesn't fit into my routine anywhere. By now they're probably past saving anyway, and they're twelve and twenty years old respectively. I reached into the pocket of the twenty-year-old one, an oatmeal-coloured blazer that I liked enough to be able to keep wearing for years even though I wore it to my father's funeral when it was nearly new, and found a wrapped hard candy, a little green ball in a twist of cellophane.
That has to date back to the London days; I'm almost certain that it came from the elderly couple who befriended me then, who had me to lunch most Sundays and gave me a bed for the night after Bible class for a couple of years. They were amazing people; they'd gone from inner-city poverty to a nice house in the suburbs and spent the rest of their lives sharing it with the less fortunate -- the handicapped, the mentally ill, the lonely young career women. Gwen had a sharp tongue, an earthy wit and a deep, thoughtful faith; they enjoyed the good things in life and shared them freely. I fled to them when I was shocked and shaky after my handbag was snatched one night in 1996, and they fed and spoiled me until I was ready to face the world again. And they kept a bag of hard candy in the car for the long drive from our Forest Hill place of worship to their home on the Kentish fringes of London.
I sold them (they insisted on paying for it) my old PC before I left London. John had a hard time with it at first -- it isn't easy for an eighty-year-old to learn to use a mouse -- but he must have mastered it, because he sent me a printed letter a while later.
They died a couple of years after I moved here, and I still miss them.
