Wood

Not a tremendously productive day. The clearing out of Mum and Dad’s everyday items from cupboards and drawers gets to me after a few days of it and makes me really sad. I still miss them both terribly, and always will. I had a sad day today and just couldn’t face any sorting out, so I read for a bit and did some laundry and errands. I also ordered some new bedroom curtains from Dunelm, plus some white china pudding bowls - all I’ve got at the moment are a couple of mismatched Willow Pattern ones that Mum and Dad used and some green earthenware ones from my old dinner service.

I’ve blipped a little bit of the surface of my old pine dining table. Mum and Dad got me the table and chairs over 40 years ago when a friend and I bought our first flat and we hardly had a stick of furniture to put in it. Sharing a mortgage was the only way we could get on the property ladder, but as two female friends in the early 80’s we were turned down by all the lenders we tried except for the Nationwide Building Society. I think there was still a bit of a misogynistic attitude from many financial institutions in those days, as there was in the workplace and on television (I watch those 80’s nostalgia programmes and gasp at the blatant prejudice in them). Fortunately times have changed. Anyway, I digress. The surface of the pine table is seasoned with age and marked with the scars of being with me all those years. Sadly it’s a bit too big for my new home (over 100cm diameter) and is not the most stylish piece of furniture, so I’ll be replacing it at some point and saying “goodbye old friend”. Happily I’m still in touch with my old friend who bought that first flat with me - the first friend I made at the BBC on our first day working there 47 years ago.

Thanks to MaryElizaR for hosting the Tiny Tuesday challenge for August around the beautiful subject of trees, with this week’s theme of ‘Wood’.