Part of my ‘mission’ while in Carluke is to help my cousin clear out her loft. Her parents weren’t hoarders, but two ninety-year olds, after 60+ years of marriage and in the same house for 50 years, are gonna have stuff. Periodically my cousin and I will FaceTime, I’ll head up into the loft, shine the camera around the room, and as I point to things, she’ll say, “Keep, Toss, or Donate”, as the case may be. Then I’ll head up there in a couple of days and do some sorting per her guidance.
Like most people of that generation, my aunt & uncle had a fair amount of silver cutlery. During the flood, (the burst pipes in December; I’m not getting biblical here), Viv and her family tackled the clean-up by just gathering things up, and either chucking them in the garbage, or shoving them up into the loft. There was no time for sorting then. Included in all that shoving things out of the way was a lot of sliverware. This morning I went through the various bags, boxes, and trays of cutlery, sorting the Tesco stainless steel everyday-ware from the bone-handle, sterling silver. And then I came across this little guy – how cute is he? What I want to know is, why on earth doesn’t every home back in Canada have one of these? Surely our lives would be better with a toffee hammer to hand.
As well as culling objects, I have been re-arranging items in the loft to make things easier for Viv to find in the future. (My mother always said, “even if you’ve got clutter, things look better in neat piles.”) A few weeks ago I pulled down the hatch, climbed the ladder, and started shifting items around the dim, dusty, every so slightly spooky loft. I picked up this little chalet made of what looks like matchsticks (about the size of a Kleenex box), and set it down over beside some other decor pieces, and turned away. As I walked away, unprompted it started playing this thin, reedy, tinkly tune; it was a music box. I’m not going to lie, it made me jump. All I could think was, imagine it had started up randomly like that in the middle of the night. How freaked out would I be to wake up to that haunting melody at 3 in the morning? I would have been lying in bed, with the blankets up to my chin, thinking, “There is no way in hell I am going up to see what is going on up there.”
