The art of life

After pressing the bell

Ms.V - Hello..

Me - Hi V..... I'm Madhan, from GoodGym

Ms.V - Oh. come on in

I entered as the door buzzed open. Ms.V will be moving to a sheltered living within a year and wanted to prepare for her move.

Last month, Emily and I helped Ms.J who was living on the same street with a similar task.

There were paintings of half-naked women and colorful flowers in every corner. Most of them were drawn 40 years back.

Ms.V doesn't call herself an artist. But she is artistic and the pictures are the proof. She loves her craft and doesn't want to bin them without having a look. She recently broke her arm which made it hard for her to carry things such as heavy books, which she has quite a lot of, and most things in general.

Ms.V prepared a list of things for me to do so that she doesn't forget them. Moving a book from the bedroom to another room was one of them. There was another book about Neolithic Greek. She wanted to look at the pictures one last time before bagging it for charity. It was given to her by a publication in the 1980s. She shared some stories about that.

Then she asked me to look for things under the visitor's bed and I found a few unfinished paintings. I put them on top of the table, as Ms.V would like to look at them later.

Then we moved to the bedroom and Ms.V wanted to remove things under her bed. I could see some kinds of stuff were there for more than a decade. We found a missing shoe and some more shoes which Ms.V couldn't wear these days.

I then found a big painting with a nice frame covered in dust. Ms.V asked me to give it a wipe with a wet cloth. It was given as a gift to her by her friend.

This was from my home and I wanted to give it to a person who would take care of it - Ms.V when she gave me her fruit bowl made of Mother of pearl

I felt emotional as Ms.V will be a part of my life whenever I use that bowl.

Things keep on coming one after the other under the bed. We put some things which were not needed in the bin bag and I placed the things that needed dusting outside the main door.

There was a Microsoft Access usage guide from the early 90s

Ms.V was interested when computers were the new innovation and wanted to learn about them. So she had some books about computers which were outdated. Sadly we had to bin them as well.

Also, more paintings were uncovered and more life stories were told by Ms.V. Time flew by, and 2 hours passed when Ms.V said that I have done more than what she expected to be done today.

Ms.V referred to old people as over 25s and don't like telling her real age. She said it was her euphemism.

Also, Ms.V said that the below is what she heard when I rang the bell.

Ms.V - Hello..

Me - Hi Old lady. I'm Madhan, from GoodGym

Ms.V - Oh. come on in

We had a giggle about that afterward as I had misspoken her name which sounded like 'old lady' to her.