Suds in the bucket

The last time I was alive,  laundry was a much different task. Encompassing. Exhausting. I can feel how raw my hands could be from the carbone soap, the steam occasionally scalding. 

In this life, the scalding is from the less routine. I spent the afternoon uploading photos to Freeprints.com so that my brother can have copies of the photos.  Today? Today I order magazine - some porn, which we agree - is the most awkward thing I've ever had to do for him.  The Mag Depot...there really is a secondary market for everything. For $13 an issue, you too can order your brother 'reading' content and disrupt your already questionable sleep.

I'm restless and a bit sad this week. It was only this morning I stopped fighting against the full weight of why: birthdays and yahrzeits, the weight of physical absence of my dad, my grandmother, and my favourite great-aunt. But it could also be my choice of reading and listening content. 

My audio books this week were Barbara Nadel's _Displaced_, Dan Fesperman's _Safe House_, and Ian Samson's _Sussex Murders_, a series I started reading to my mother in the early days of burn units. The former two - one a layered mystery novel of the Holocaust, the other, a look at the US bureaucratic apparatus abroad - heavily featuring archives and records management - well, how could I not now be fan-girling over Fesperman? I got that excited buzz I felt when I finally tracked down Charles Bowden and his book _Down by the River_, only 20 years after hearing an interview with him on NPR's On the Media at 3am. 

I had been listening to 'Blood Ties,' a Wordery podcast and thinking about the lines between when fiction depicts a reality that never existed as opposed to being based on a true story. The nature of 'composite character' over historically 'constructed' fiction. The layers of what is truth/fact versus perception...is it any wonder I retreated into a Hallmark bubble by Friday night? 

Throw in the need for a new roof on a client's house and a Christmas fayre that feels disarmingly early this year and...well...I can't decide if the current red flags being offered up are quite my colour, except I already have. Invited to the Opera but a ghost of Springs past, I say 'Sure, just make sure you send my ticket before hand, just in case you fall through a trapdoor again.' And I'm quite serious: I haven't been to the Opera I ages, so why not?