Should I be happy or sad?
Ash has always done the DIY in the houses we've lived in (only 3 in total but still ....). he's self taught and I still remember the time I came home from work to find he'd taken a sledge hammer to the pantry wall and piled the bricks in the middle of the front lawn. He then had to plaster the remaining wall to cover where the join had been but couldn't get the plaster to stick so watered it down and painted it on then wallpapered straight on top leaving a slightly less than professional finish. He got better over the years and when we moved here just over thirty seven years ago there was lots to do. Over the years he's replaced the kitchen three times including moving it to a different room once; redesigned the bathroom; plumbed in a utility room and shower room from scratch; knocked down sheds and replaced them with a raised brick patio and on and on until his 'piece de resistance' was to build a brick and tile veranda along the entire length of the back of the house. So there was nothing I couldn't ask him to do but then dementia kicked in and he started ignoring jobs, showing less enthusiasm for changing anything and getting anxious when things couldn't be left any longer so yesterday, when he said he was going to fasten the hose pipe onto a bracket on the wall in the garden, I wasn't quite sure what to expect but he was enthusiastic so I left him to it and tried not to look. This morning he's finished his project and I'm not quite sure what to think. In the past he would have found something with which he could create a bracket and it would have been functional if not necessarily beautiful so at the beginning I was sort of expecting something like that however what I'd seen was lots of pieces of wood being sawn and what I'd heard was the sound of drilling so when summoned to see the finished project I went outside with no little trepidation. And what he's created is ok and useful, just so far from what he used to be capable of that I'm sad. Instead of the bracket he'd been so sure of we have a rickety, wobbly shelf with non-matching legs. It's stained the colour of all the other woodwork in the garden (black) and it supports the hose pipe which is it's main purpose it's just that if he'd seen it anywhere else he would have been so scathing and instead he loves it. So I'm happy that he's completed his project but sad that he's losing those skills ever more rapidly and not sure which of those feelings comes first.
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Don't forget you can sign up to have this delivered straight into your inbox, just remember to click on the validation email (which may be in your junk mail/trash box). You can share specific posts with others by clicking on the 3 dots at the top right hand corner of the page, you can share the blog by copying and pasting the web address www.memoryfortwo.com or you can email me at memoryfortwo@gmail.com if you have anything you want to say privately. You can also now follow me on twitter, just search for Memory For Two, and you can find me on facebook https://www.facebook.com/Memory-for-Two-287197572048864.
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