There is a plaque on the door that reads, simply, “Hope”.
It’s a Christmas decoration, really. But I am leaving it there. It seems appropriate somehow.
Because, to look at our house now, it is rather bleak.
The breeze block wall at the front, which severely restricts access to the front door, and thus, the letter box, is not pretty. And the pit beyond it (“Please chuck post in pit”), is now sodden. I’ve had a couple of Amazon deliveries that have suffered as a result. In fact, the post lady made her way round to the back of the house today, looking worried, as she did yesterday, too. She knocked on the door (no letterbox at the back, either), and finally broached the subject of the missing means to safely deliver my mail.
It’s a nightmare, I agreed with her. I’ll have a word with my husband, I promised. I’ll get a box to put the post in, I suggested.
In fact, I probably won’t do any of those things. And it isn’t really all that bad. It just looks that way. For the post lady, who presumably has a procedure to follow, I guess it may be a little unorthodox to deliver to a house with no suitable hole. She went on her way today, looking slightly less concerned now that she realised that I fully understood the challenges she was facing with our funny little bungalow.
Which got me wondering where Barry, our usual postie, has got to. He knew the score here. He just chucked the post in the pit, as instructed, and was already familiar with the degeneration that had begun.
Oh God! Maybe we’ve scared him off.
And so, as we start out on the journey that is Twenty Sixteen, we do so with hope that maybe, one day, we might have even more “progress” to report. There’s a lot to do, and I am not expecting it to happen quickly. In fact, I have no idea of the timescales involved here. Two years? Five? Ten? Nobody knows. So the post may be a problem for a while yet.
But it’s all fine. IT IS FINE. Optimism is the stance I am going for. We are not living in a caravan yet, for we still have a roof. The mould may be growing at an alarming rate on our poorly 30s walls, but I am becoming good at wiping it off. The heating works, and oil is cheap.
So I am confident that progress will come.
I can’t blame Pandora for opening this box. We did this all by ourselves. And also, Little Seymour Number One might protest strongly if she thought we were using her as the excuse for our current living conditions. (Yes, that’s her name!)
But we do have hope left.
And a lot more besides.
🙂
0 Comments