Ten days of locking myself in…without locks or bolted doors or hidden keys.
Ten days of whirling up an indoor tsunami and dumping everything in a totally alien spot. Shoes inside the washing machine, clocks in drawers, beds on their sides, books inside pillow covers, the oven on the floor.
Ten days of paint smell swirling around the house, of tall jaunty painters rotating around the house with their paint brushes and their mobile songs, of splashes, of scraping and scouring.
Ten days of terrified dogs, tired Hema and temperamental me… trying to get the painting and polishing right.
We are on the penultimate day of this house arrest and house painting exercise, and its a good feeling to see things slowly return to their place and position. The walls are clean and bright, the kitchen gleams in its new turmeric avatar, and Biskit’s heartbeat is returning to normal.
Ten days of house-arrest have been exhausting and bone-breaking tiring, to say the least!! and what do I have to show at the end of this period?
- A bright and shiny home greets me every morning.
- Three new cushion covers culled out of a beautiful, old and forgotten piece of Manipuri weaving…I stitched them after reading these superb instructions.
- Bolster cover sewing pattern formulated with some maths and some furnishing silk.
- Cowl knitting in serious progress….a pattern of snippets of wool and some graph paper.
- Discarded furniture, DVDs, paper records and receipts and lots of accumulated souvenirs sent out into the world.
And finally, can I share the best outcome of this voluntary house-arrest?
No repeating these ten days for the next ten years! I will limp back to normalcy tomorrow. Phew.