Not in Kansas Any More...

 It has struck me over the last couple of days, that this housework business is not a temporary nuisance, to be borne for a short while. No, this is a day in day out, eternal mountain of jobs, varying from easy and vaguely interesting to tiring and down right boring. Like Sysiphus who has to push the great heavy boulder up the hill every night only for it to roll back down in the morning, so that he has to repeat the labour again and again never-endingly… It is not going away. What actually hit me today as I was standing in the bathroom pondering over our cornflower blue bath and sink, a relic of the sixties (and only mildly better than the avocado baths which followed in the seventies…), was that the blue sink and bath in question are never ever going to get clean, unless I clean it, and that the heap of clothes in the hamper are there for good unless I wash them, hang them out and iron them, that the kitchen floor is never going to get mopped – and yet it will continue to get dirtier and germier – unless I mop it (I or Dan of course who does do some of these things…) Making sure the children’s uniforms are washed and ironed regularly so they can go to school looking decent is my task and mine alone…

For the last eighteen years, I have had someone coming in to clean my house every weekday. I have, all my adult life, been able to say to myself, “Oh well, Florence/Martha/Judith will get that on Monday morning.” Not to say I have never wielded a mop or a broom, that I have never washed a dish or cleaned an oven – I have done so pretty often (!), but, on those days when it could wait, it definitely waited…

It is not so much that this is all rather annoying and takes rather a lot of my time which I could be using for other things… (agreed)… but it is, I am finding, a pressure. I HAVE to clean the kitchen floor before someone comes round! I HAVE to keep up with dishes or we will simply sink. At the moment our lives are still completely irregular, - out sofa-hunting one day, off to see old friends another, off to a meeting today -  but I am hoping that we will in the next short while manage to get into some kind of routine so that I find that I can fit in the jobs, and share them with the rest of my family, so that it just becomes part of normal life and not an issue…

Last Sunday we visited the second of our link churches. Again it was a warm and friendly experience. We had worked on our power point so that it flowed better and told a story rather than being a random set of photos, and a good crowd stayed after church to watch it, followed by a great discussion.

I was amazed going through our recent Uganda photos – but how could I have forgotten so soon? – how bright and incredible all the colours are  - the birds outrageously blue or scarlet or yellow, the sky so blue, the grass SO green, people’s clothing, the bougainvilleaea and the hibiscus, the market stalls covered in a rainbow of fruit, - all made more glowing by the intense sunlight. Here in England we are entering autumn, where the sun is lower in the sky (yes we have actually had a lot of sunshine…!), and the colours are gentle and muted, the trees already turning from green to tawny browns, golds and reds. We do have flowering bushes in our garden, and roses, pansies, sweet purple wood cyclamen and primroses, and the two big old apple trees which are dripping with large red and green fruit, but, it looks nothing like those vividly colourful photos of Uganda.

Sometimes we miss sitting on our verandah watching the birds pecking around in our crazy flowering trees and hopping around the pottery bird bath. Sometimes I see a movement in a tree here and think, Monkey? and then realise that never in this dispensation will a monkey be seen swinging and jumping through the trees in this garden. Sometimes a memory or a thought makes me flash back to Uganda and our home there, and I miss it so much it hurts.

But there are things I am also very relieved to have left behind, like the ants gathering on plates by the sink, and the cockroaches, the dust lurking on and under the bottom shelves of everything, and the heat, and the traffic. It is a mixture of relief and sadness. I badly want to see all my friends there (you who are reading this!), but I am loving meeting up again with even older friends here. Feeling kind of stretched between two worlds. Ah well, time to do the dishes…