What is So Rare as a Day in June?

June has been so good to me. First we made the decision not to move to BC yet. There was not a single suitable property come up for sale in the small town where we wanted to live in the year we’d been watching the market. So we’re going to hang tight, pare down and redecorate here so the place is easier to keep clean, and wait until the time is right. 

Second, I’m finally able to access the amount of medication I need for my muscle disorder. I had access to some for the last couple of years, but it was the last bit of the supply, and no one was making more, so I was taking only enough to keep me out of the hospital. Suddenly a new company has picked up the patent and begun to produce the medication again, and I can take the amount I need. This means I am strong enough to have a life! I can hardly tell you how that feels. 

Third, our younger son and his wife are coming to visit from Switzerland for almost three weeks in July. We are so happy, because we haven’t seen him since February 2013! Last summer he married a beautiful Swiss woman we have come to love. We can’t wait to meet her and spend time with the both of them. 

Referring back to number 1 on this list we are redecorating. When we moved here we set up the living room in what is called “the den” on the floor plans. It is an inside room and has no windows. We soon regretted our decision but by then the furniture was bought, yada, yada. Well, thankfully the furniture was all found at a bargain, and after six years we feel no pain at moving it along free of charge to those who can use it. A friend has bought a new house and is taking the hutch, table and chairs for his basement. I’ll call the Syrian Refugee Committee to see if someone can use the sofa and book table. 

We are moving the living room into the room adjacent to the kitchen, buying a new sleeker sofa, building floor-to-ceiling shelves between the end of the kitchen cabinets and the outer wall, and buying a couple of new chairs. Mr. Hobbes is not at all pleased that we put his wheel on the balcony, but it’s huge and he mostly spends his time ripping the foam running surface off and carrying the pieces all over the house. It has a sticky side, so I have to scrape it off the floor, every dambed day.  

Anyway, we will hire a painter and have the place repainted, white, chalk paint, maybe one pale aqua wall, behind the shelves in the living room. I’d love to replace the kitchen cupboards but no time now. Later maybe. In the meantime I am going through and pitching everything we don’t use or need. I can see from the space left to store things without the open shelving in the bedroom that I have not been ruthless enough. Second round pruning coming up. I do not plan on putting honking great boxes of files in the floor-to-ceiling shelves in the living room. Husband, being in his former life a bookkeeper-accountant, or as he likes to say, an “account ant”, feels every receipt for the past seven years is a vital document. Warranties are sacred covenants, sometimes long after the appliance has expired. 

We have four large 10” x 20” boxes of paper files which at the moment have no home, unless we sleep on the floor tonight. I admit one of these is mine, documentation of dead ancestors gathered over the last 40 years. I need to go through it, but as much of it was gathered with my much loved sister-in-law June, and my cousin Brenda, and in it are many letters from family members who’ve stepped beyond the curtain love cannot draw back, I always end up in tears when I try to sort it. Best left for now. But we will go through the other three boxes and try to consolidate them. 

And Fourth, I have reconnected with my beloved girlhood friend, whom I had lost track of after her mother’s death. Her mother and I corresponded once I was married, until she died of ALS in 1991. All these years I’d looked for my friend, didn’t remember her married name, and then in yet another Google search her maiden name popped up, I wrote and that was that. It’s as if 50+ years have rolled away. Three hours on the phone and almost daily emails, and we are school girls again. It’s been absolutely wonderful, and capped off this June as being unexpectedly brilliant! 

So there’s the ree-port. Now I best get back to ruthless pruning (before I lose my nerve).