May 25, 2020
Review, Edit and Update:
There were the usual fixes for sentence structure and punctuation, additions of detail, but absolutely no typos. More importantly I learned what boards Emelina was on: Arts and Culture; Hospital and a third unnamed one. There is also a sentence that suggests future story: Emelina had no idea that the decision [which board to keep] really had been made for her, she just had to learn for herself what was already in motion. In future episodes, I'll have to learn if this has in fact played out.
Pretensions Aside
Silence greeted them when they walked in. Dez and Emelina had been talking nonstop from Hartley. Only a distance of five miles, but long enough to go over their activities from the day before. They had done little talking then, both involved in picking up the threads of their individual lives. Dez had unearthed her paints, easel, and a half finished canvas. Setting it up in the kitchen where the light was best, she put on her old painting apron and got lost in blues and ochres and brilliant reds. Emelina had logged on to her emails with Dez’s help, and scrolled through them all, discarding the notifications from various airlines and credit card updates before reading the important ones. She was a board member of three boards ~ one that only met once a year. She decided she could resign from that one. The other two? One was Arts and Culture, the other was hospital board. She didn’t feel comfortable on either one, but she had decided to choose only one to sit on. What did surprise her was concerns from her friends on these boards. Where are you, haven’t heard from you in a couple of weeks? Call me, how are you? She supposed it shouldn’t have surprised her. She had worked with and known most of these people for years. And then there was this You won’t be hearing from me for a while because of the hospital situation we have right now. Email me with any questions or suggestions of where there’s any assistance needed. Once more, Emelina felt empty. At the hospital board meetings, she seldom knew what was being discussed. It was more than funding and finances. Medical jargon was tossed around like it was a foreign language that she would never understand. She really understood the art world, sort of. She did answer the emails about her whereabouts, apologizing for not being in touch before now. As far as deciding which board to keep on her schedule, she would have to give it more thought. Emelina had no idea that this decision really had been made for her, she just had to learn for herself what was already in motion.
Emelina and Dez drove to the back of the mansion and came in through the mud room, into the kitchen. The stillness and silence was almost heavy. Conversation stopped, as though even one word uttered would shatter something precious.
In a quiet voice, almost a whisper, Emelina said “We’ll hang up our coats down here. Let’s go upstairs so I can show you around.” The arrows that Digby had put on the upstairs hallway floor were untouched. “I’ll have to clean that off. I think it’s only chalk so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.” There was a time when Emelina would have been very annoyed and expected someone else to clean it up. In the two weeks that she and Dez had been together in their ‘kitchen home’, many of her holier than thou attitudes had shifted and been pushed aside. She had never clearly felt the emptiness of her home until today. All of the rooms, decorated in shades of blues and whites were lovely, well appointed with clean lines and stunning artwork.
“Dez, I don’t think I want to come back here to live! But this is my home. This is the strangest feeling. This is like walking into somebody else’s show home.”
Dez had just remained quiet as she watched her sister. It was as though she was seeing her home for the first time and didn’t recognize any of it. “Emmie, we can fix this.”
“But I can’t live here all by myself anymore. I've even recognized that the people that work for me are people. Much more than that, they are my friends. How can that be fixed? Sell this place and let the staff go? With what’s going on in the world right now, no one in their right mind would buy this big old place and all the land. There is no place for any of my staff to go. Several have worked for this estate for years.”
”It’s not that big a place. I know you call it a mansion, and you’ve got the staff that goes with a mansion, but it’s really not that big. It’s not even as big as the apartment block I live in. So you’ve got an ‘upstairs’ and a ‘downstairs’? So what? You could do a lot with this place. I don’t know. What about an artist’s retreat? Or a bed and breakfast - not that there’s a lot of traveling happening these days - but down the road? You’ve got Cook and Martha and Digby. You’ve told me a lot about them, how great they are. They should all be able to come back here pretty soon and you wouldn’t be alone." Dez stopped suddenly in the third bedroom Emmie was showing her. "Wow! Have you got ensuite bathrooms in every bedroom!?”
“No, not every bedroom. One of the bedrooms is really a den ~ it doesn’t have a bathroom. Mike liked to call it a library, but there’s not that many books in there. You know, I think I do have to spend two or three nights out here on my own. This may sound very strange but I need to feel where I belong ~ and if I belong ~ in this big old place. I’ve never taken the time to explore this old house before. I’ll take you back into town, get my things and come back out here. Would you mind?”
“Of course I wouldn’t mind! I have some things to do in Hartley ~ like getting my car out of the impound and seeing if I will still have a job. Filing for E.I. I don’t even know if I qualify. I’ll text you about the things I get figured out and you let me know if you get things figured out. You do know how to text, don’t you?”
“Of course. Texting is how we board members communicate with each other. I’ll also let Digby and Martha know I’m out here. If they need anything, I can get it for them. This is actually kind of exciting. There is one painting in Mike’s den that I always disliked, actually I hate it ~ that will be one of the first things to change. Even if I just take it down and store it in a closet. But I do have to be careful because it is actually quite valuable.”
“I know which painting you’re talking about.” Going abruptly into the den across from the bedroom they’d been in, she pointed to a large abstract in garish, slashing colours.
“That’s it. Now that I look at it I may not have a large enough place to store it. I’ll figure that out later. Let’s go to the kitchen and have some supper, then I’ll take you back into Hartley.”
Emelina finally felt as though she had some direction. She wasn’t really certain about where it would take her, but she felt brave enough to go forward. Well, almost brave enough. Having Dez back in her life had filled a gap that she hadn’t known was there.
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
Michael de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
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