Getting off the phone with Mama can sometimes take 30-45 minutes. Every time we’re winding things down, she says something or I say something that we want to talk about. We’re both still finding our ways without Daddy here in the flesh.
He will always be here, just not in a way we can reach out and touch or see with our eyes. We see with our hearts and souls, instead.
I talk to Mama mostly on the weekends, although she’s taken to calling during the week, sometimes. On the weekends, I work a call in around errands and chores. And I always seem to be doing laundry or getting ready to do laundry when I talk to her.
I don’t do wash during the week if I can help it. I save it up and take care of it on days off. It’s such an abysmal chore that I sometimes put it off until we have almost no clean clothes.
I hate it more than any other chore I do.
There are perverse people, I realize, who enjoy the “zen” of laundry. It’s a mindless task that they meditate through.
Their backs are better than mine.
All that lifting and toting and folding and hanging hurt. Take existential boredom and toss in some physical pain, you have my idea of hell.
When I was getting off the phone the other night with Mama, I told her that it was getting late and that I still had laundry to do. She told me that it seemed like I was always doing laundry.
“As little as I can”, I reassured her.
I told her that if I ever went to Hell (a prospect we both agreed wasn’t likely), they would put me in the laundry room.
Dante had his Inferno, but I’m more afraid of Hell’s laundry room.
I stayed on the phone longer than I had expected, but I usually do. We’re both still working through the whole ugly and painful grief process, and talking always seems to help. So I don’t mind. It helps me as much as it does her.
In the mean time, I have laundry to do, among other things.
If I could neglect it, I would, gladly. But I can’t.
And when I meet St. Peter at the gates, I’m going to ask for a houseboy to take care of that kind of stuff for me.
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