After three years of pleading with anyone and everyone I could think of in the provincial government hierarchy, I was finally successful in securing a place for my eldest sister in a nursing home where she can get the care she desperately needs and I can reclaim my own life. Her admission to the facility capped some of the most difficult months of my life. My health was declining, I hadn't slept through the night in months, every part of my body hurt and I burned through the battery in my pacemaker at an alarming rate. In the end it came down to a threatened negligence lawsuit and a talk with the press which the placement officer clearly understood not to be an idle threat. Suddenly, a spot opened up and I was given forty-eight hours to move my sister into the facility. The timing of it also meant that I had one week to get her settled in before I left for a long-planned family trip to the UK.
In the week before we left, I spent every day helping Nancy get settled into the nursing home. I filled out reams of forms, gave 60 days notice to her landlord, cancelled her phone and cable services and on and on. By the time I left for our trip, I was exhausted. I stopped waking up in a panic worrying whether or not she was safe. I know she is safe in the nursing home but my nighttime worries turned instead into how I was going to clear out her apartment in the six weeks I had remaining before the lease expired. Nan's apartment was huge - bigger than my first house, and her inclination to be a collector had turned into full-blown hoarding when her cognitive skills went into decline more than a decade ago. There wasn't a surface in the apartment that wasn't covered in stuff. I worked in the apartment every day for six weeks. My friends, Julie and Geraldine often worked with me. My husband diligently did the heavy lifting and my son and his partner worked beside me whenever they could. Every cabinet, every tiny box, bin, chest, cupboard, vase, dish or bowl had to be gone through thoroughly. I found a gold earring in a box of paperclips, thousands of envelopes, close to a hundred unused notebooks and journals, twenty identical pairs of earmuffs, all unused and at least a hundred nail clippers. There were four working sewing machines, boxes and boxes of ribbons and sewing notions and more fabric than you may reasonably find in a fabric store. And that was the tip of the iceberg. Three or four hundred cookbooks, more than 20 of them chocolate cookbooks were rounded out by cocktail and bartending recipe books, an interesting collection for a woman who didn't drink alcohol. And then there were the dishes and tea cups and saucers, collections of lovely bar glasses that still had the price stickers on them, hundreds of magazines and enough art supplies to stock an art school for a year, thousands of family photos and prayer cards (though she claimed to be an atheist) and funeral registers and receipts dating back to the death of my grandfather in 1935.
Sifting, sorting, packing and moving treasures into storage used every day of the first five weeks. For the sixth week, I hired a company to take out everything for disposal or donation that wasn't going to made it to the rented storage unit or into the home of a family member or friend. On the final day before the company came, Jacob joined me at the apartment to sort through the kitchen cupboards. They were so far above my head that I couldn't even see what was in them. Jacob pulled things from the cupboard above the fridge - an ice cream maker, empty jars, more dishes and baking tools and then I saw it - the canning pot. Nan hasn't used the canning pot in more than thirty years. It belonged to my mother before her and to my grandmother before that. I have long wanted the pot, but Nan didn't know where it was and we assumed it was lost. I brought it home.
As the growing season is coming to its conclusion for this year, I am coming to the end of my canning season. My generous friends have been sharing the bounty of their gardens and I have been making the jams and relishes that my grandmother made and I enjoyed in childhood. Today I made rhubarb jam and green tomato relish that we will enjoy with our tourtiere on Christmas Eve. I used my Mimi's canning pot. It felt like magic. Small joys.
