Monday, November 3, 2014

Well October did not end well at all on the 30th I took Bijou out for his last outing. I was very tired and just wanted it over with. Still gloomy mood.I did not measure the step up to the side walk very well, kicked it instead and fell flat face first on the concrete.

Immediately blood was flooding from somewhere on my head and in no time it ran down my cheek into my neck. I first checked me legs, hell was going to be paid if I hurt my legs again but I noticed just scraped my knee , I rang my little emergency button. I thought Bob would hear the alarm inside. It does take them a few minutes to respond. I turned around and sa on the sidewalk legs stretched out hoping someone would come by. Street deserted. The long and the short of it Bob got a hold of me and called an ambulance. 

I had 3 kids I know about head wounds, they bleed forever. My mother used to call that a spring cleaning of the blood, wondered if it helped in fall.
Bob started to clean my face and 4 EMS walked in, 3 like football players, giants, one tiny gentle female nurse named Renee like in french.
I started to laugh and told the guys to get out of here, I just had a cut.
I did not look bad when I checked later , I should not have checked the next day, Halloween
day I had the best mask on. The eye looked like a big white egg and closed and everything
around it was purple and swollen.
Bob gave out the candy that night BUT no one came.....side street always gets fergotten.

More or less in some sort of daze I sat the next 3 days in my recliner and was being served by my handsome son. Bored the first hour and wanting to clean he put me back in the chair.
Then I remembered my Kindle.
I was reading a series by Vernon Coleman , about a young doctor in Bilbury , a small country village.
There are 7 books. 
Vernon has a knack of telling people and animal stories.
It is light reading and amusing. Just what I needed.
I wondered how he ever managed to keep all the people apart in his many chapters.
He would tell you that Mrs. Darbinshire had a knitted jacket with holes on the elbow and faded green and under that a nylon blouse.....(nylon? I wondered how Vernon knew nylon).
Her knitted socks were no longer holding up and curled around her legs.....
That sort of thing he wrote for every person.
I Imagined that he had a large board in his studio and had cut out dolls or ads with all sorts of people in full clothing and he had given them a name. Or a filing cabinet with cards:"E for Edith she is the one with......" 
Otherwise I can't see how he could remember his whole cast of characters in 7 books.
They were all characters in different mind sets.
Much was going on in the pub and I wondered how they could all drink that much.
Who carved W S into tables? Yes, that William Shakespeare! Do the cows really like Elvis?
What do you see when you look at an oak tree? It has a whole story of its own.
I was delighted when I read that sheep will know their offspring when they meet again in a herd of 200.....how cute is that?

I am on book 6 and I shall miss it when I am done with 7. But I read that Vernon has written a lot of books so perhaps I will get something else that will calm me.

This was better than Valium, only trouble was that the dr.'s wife kept baking, every other chapter she was making vegetable soup or sconces and rock biscuits (Rock?) so I often sat here salivating.

By the e4nd of book 3  I was asking Bob for a torch and wondered if he had enough petrol in his car. I was getting too British for my own good. Not enough that I translate Flemish jokes in American and they do not get it (my kids) now I will throw in a new wrench.

Today I feel a wee bit better but my face is ugly , the scraped side is still scraped.
Eye still swollen. I am beginning to drink tea. Nothing fancy but with honey! I snarled at the box with Spekulaas from Belgium. Must get to the British stuff. 

I doubt there is such a gorgeous untouched village like Bilbury. A lot have tatched roofs and still outdoor toilets....well I grew up in something like that but it was the 30's and 40's. We had an outdoor house and I hated to go in town and having to use the loo in a store, I was afraid of all that water when I pulled the chain. If I could I would hold it all in till I was home and the familiar outhouse.
We did not have a phone, only had a radio when my father was fixing one for someone else.
Our village had probably tops 200 people in it but was also part of the city of Ghent,
We knew every one, my mother hated gossip but she did not mind listening now and then to know who had blue powder at their door this morning.
Blue powder would show up in the dark of the night, it was someone telling the inhabitants that someone was cheating in that house hold. When one tried to wash it from the cobblestone sidewalk it would turn into a blue like paint, it would not go away that quickly and would run down to the next and the next door till you wondered where it had started .....
Lucky they did not do it to our door , they could have, my father was busy, but he was also a police man so maybe they did not want to do that to him.
We had one "bar" known as a "pub" over the pond. She did not serve food to my recollection.
Every bar to my mother was a house of prostitution. Even if it would have been a bar for kids only. She rarely would walk into one. My grandfather loved the bars and always found a collectio of people listening to his stories. He was a raconteur!(read story teller).
A rag man would come with his pushcart hoping someone had rags for him to buy by the kilo. We wore everything till they became rags. Gypsies came with entourages we feared but they could mend aluminum pots like no other and also sharpen our knives and scissors. Mothers came out for them and hid the kids inside. One would always tell your fortune for money but my mother was afraid to know her future and we did not have money for that.

Drifters would mark something on a tree or the hedge or your house. It was a "sign" language that would tell the next one that this house was friendly and you would get a meal.
My mother did not like them, she was afraid of them, if she had bread she would always share with them and then tell them who her husband was and please run now. They did.
Which just reminds me that we had an ex-cop living across the street for a few years(now jumping to 2014)  and one day
someone had painted a penis on the road, it did not wash away with the rain either. We had no idea what it was till some gossiper told us that this was a sign that a policeman lived there. 

My mother took on one job seriously in the village and that was as a nurse. Her sister was the RN but my mother had the heart of one. She just cleaned people up when sick and often was asked to sit by the dying. She may not have known much about them but they knew where to find Madame D. 

No one even at her work in the office for decades, no one ever called my mother by the first name. Only her intimate friends. She was always Madame. I doubt there was another Madame in the small village except for one who owned several houses. She was also a blue blood which means you have a small V on the "van" or a small "de" before the rest of your name that one richlady was Madame de La....

Stephanie down on the island had her beauty parlor in her kitchen.
Next door was the butcher, he would tell all his clients that his wife could not work with him when she had her period. I bet she was one female you was glad to get cramps.

The butcher had a habit of throwing your meat on the scale with the same gusto as a pizza maker, he had a reason, as he threw it up there it would show 500 grams and he quickly like a Houdini grabbed it before it went down to 300. Mother would have none of it, she'd say leave it on the scale Jean, I do not want to pay for more then what I owe. The answer would be :"Ja, Madame D."

My mother had to have her bra's and corsets made to order, she had a woman who made wonders to harness all this flesh, to top it off my mother lived decades with a hernia on both sides and refused surgery. Her corsets had suede covered circles to push in the hernia and make her more comfortable. I do not think that my mother ever went into a store for these items.

I knew a small village but ours had large flaws it was in the middle of a canal  and nothing but industry beyond my house. You could hang out the wash which was an enormous labor for my mother over a boiled kettle on the coal stove and then the electric factory would open up the garbage and the white sheets had black specks all over them , a Dalmatian would not have been able to compete. So she would start all over again. 
I hated the industry, hated the smoke, I had bad lungs already as I had pleurisy which almost killed me. I could not wait to get out of there.

So most of my life, well the last 40 years have been in North Carolina and guess what is but about 12 miles from here....a large electric factory with 2 large chimneys very busy throwing out something. I have problems looking at them.

I live in a small town, do not know the names of most people around me. We wave as we pass each other and I walk the dogs or just say "Hi"!
I could not care at all if they had blue paint at their door or the IRS man. Everyone lives their own life. Most of the time when I meet someone they are holding a cel phone anyway.
 

 

 
 
 
 
 

No comments: