Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and I headed over to my mum’s place with a card in hand. From what I can see, about 80% of the Mother’s Day cards out there are the excessively soppy ones that I’m not that keen on, and that she wouldn’t appreciate. That generally leaves just a few semi-jokey (and thus acceptable) cards left on the shelf.
One memorable card from years past was “The Mothership has landed”, with a picture of a UFO, and lots of mothers coming out of it, bearing hot pies, and proclaiming things like “We never hear from you anymore” and “Are you eating properly?” From what I recall, my friend Brian once gave it to his mum, too.
This year’s card though was a “How many mothers does it take to change a lightbulb?”, with the answer being something along the lines of “Only one, because it won’t change itself, and nobody else around here will get off their bum and do it.” She liked it.
But the main reason I went over was to help move furniture around the house. My mum’s house is undergoing a refurbishment at the moment — painting, new carpets, new lino, etc. In terms of furniture movement, it’s almost worse than moving house. At least when you’re moving house, everything is going somewhere. For this though, you’re having to find out-of-the-way places for everything until it’s finished. All the books are in boxes in a big stack in the dining room; all the bookshelves under a tarp in the garden. The house looks unnaturally empty.
When that was all finished, I moved Marita’s stuff back to her house. After 6 months, the work there is almost finished. Like every renovation in the history of the universe, it ran over-time, naturally.
