speeding | Nice piece of work

I don’t have anything particularly special to report on the crafting front today, just getting my stuff ready and priced for the Tulbagh market and finishing something for Maryanne’s Made-It Challenge, so I thought I’d share a story about my mother, Didi.

She recently broke her hip and cracked her pelvis, one Sunday morning pottering around in her kitchen, by slipping on the tiled floor and landing badly. By 10pm that evening, she had been operated on, and the surgeon had inserted metal pins to hold everything back in place. By 10.30pm, she was on the phone to me, telling me that she was going to be fine, couldn’t feel a thing, and I didn’t need to worry. When I offered to go up to Joburg to help in some way, she said it wasn’t necessary. (She actually said I’d just end up getting in the way and irritating her, so at least she’s honest!)

Two days later, she had gone through two physiotherapy sessions and was on her way home. Within one week, she was being driven to and from the huge farm property she is busy renovating, 20 minutes from her home, where two of the labourers would carry her around on a chair so she could supervise and keep an eye on everything. (I should add that my mother is very small, probably doesn’t weigh more than 45 kgs!). The image of her being carted around on her ‘litter’ while she waves her crutch like a mad wizard and issues orders still cracks me up.

She still can’t walk, it will probably be October before she’s ready for that, but that hasn’t stopped her either. Last week she decided she was ready to drive (she has an automatic) so she had her wheelchair put in the back and drove herself off to the farm. She had promised to be very very careful and to drive slowly, but … guess who got stopped for speeding on the way home? The cop who pulled her over was no match for her, and I figure the poor chap was more than happy to pretend it was a non-event within 2 minutes of face-to-face communication. It seems he was confused by the wheelchair in the back, the extra crutches in the front (one of which would have had a sombrero perched on top of it)*, and my mother’s refusal to accept that she had been speeding at all, despite the hi-tech equipment they use these days.

I am not allowed to say how old my mother is, and she herself is unable to answer truthfully when someone asks her how old her daughter is. I am 50, but she says she just can’t get that word out properly. I think the last time it came up, she managed to say that I was f….forty-one, and her granddaughter was eight…yes, eight. Ten years off for all of us!

Here is a pic from my stepsister’s wedding in March this year, my mother is on the right in the grey and black top. And that’s me being very original by giving my stepdad antennae.