So much roaming around the countryside this year. To Sydney, to Lancefield, to Wangaratta and now to Buderim/Maroochydore. I stayed at my sister's flat in Maroochydore, my parents live in Buderim.
The weekend just gone, plus part of the Friday and the Monday was spent sorting my parent's possessions. My Dad is dying and his tools and books needed going through. Mum wanted kitchen stuff sorted as well as the bathroom and laundry cupboards. Neither parent is able to do this themselves. Dad is practically bedridden, Mum has very poor mobility and is approaching blindness (macular degeneration).
My brother, my sister and I started with the garage. My Dad must've kept every piece of wood, every nut/bolt/screw/nail/piece of wire that passed through his hands in the last fourtenn years (the time they've been in the retirement village). A product of the Depression years definitely. I do know that bits and pieces can be very handy for fixing or making things. It's actually good to have a stash for this purpose. I don't know about every bit and piece though.
My brother was in charge of sorting food: packets, tins and jars. The package that eventually won the how-long-has-this-been-kept competition had an expiry date in 1995.
Dad, AIF in Palestine 1941.
Plenty of "name the mystery object" happened in the garage sorting. The garage amounted to Dad's shed. They haven't had a car for years. Dad wanted all his hand tools kept. Lots of them, as he was a carpenter by trade. The power tools are to be sold or given away.
Suitcases of photos, slides and 8mm films (plus an ancient film projector). Dad had the films put on DVD several years ago, the film was deteriorated even then. Sorting the photos and books will have to wait, we ran out of time.
It was bittersweet, this sorting. The registration and name tags that belonged to Mum and Dad's last ever dog (she died about six years ago). Coming across yet another tin of screws. The worn end of a chisel - many hits with a mallet - reinforced with a metal band. The scarred saw horses. Ever more jars of nails. A plastic bag full of neatly rolled pieces of rope. Dad's work apron (made by Mum). A block of beeswax from Dad's and his family's days as migratory apiarists (I prefer this to "travelling beekeepers"). The discovery of another cache of wood, just when you thought there couldn't possibly be any more. Exclamations: "I remember that from the shed in Katherine!".
But...as much stuff as we tidied and kept we put in boxes for the op-shop or tossed in a bin. Some things were too imbued with family history to go, not family heirlooms, more "family relics". As an aside, heirloom is pronounced hairloom in my family, aspersions is nasturtiums as in' "I hope you're not casting nasturtiums on my taste in shoes". There's more, but I won't bore you with them.
Nothing written on the back of this photo but it would've been taken after the end of WWII, probably somewhere in outback Qld, maybe around Charleville.
During all this Dad was in hospital, desperate to come home and die (he is home now). We visited every day, my siblings and I. Mum can't get in or out of any sort of car, she is essentially housebound.
Over the few days of visiting I was somehow able to let go of anger that I'd been harbouring for many years regarding particularly nasty things Dad had said to me on a number of occasions. I think it was because there, in the hospital bed, he was diminished. A frail old man wearing a nappy. And being a parent myself I'm well aware that you do the best you can. My brother and sister are single.
It was liberating.
