In Love
In the house that we are staying in, there is a woman working here whom I love. Her name is… well…. J, for anonymity’s sake. When I first met her I was frightened of her, much like everyone else who meets her. She is grandmother-ish in age, Irish and has been employed as a cleaning lady in the house for 35 years. By now J is and basically is the boss. Not in title, but by proxy. The details of J’s life are a bit of a mystery. Partly because everyone is afraid to ask. She won’t yell at you; I don’t know if she raises her voice, but she has a way of cutting off compliments, real or imagined, with an acerbic wit with that leaves a taste in your mouth like too many Sweet-Tarts. Little by little I have been getting to know her.
She has never missed a day of work in the 35 years she has been working here, and it is doubtful that she missed work at any previous jobs.
J appears to be morally conservative but open to fresh ideas as long as they don’t go against her strongly held personal convictions.
So after a few weeks my fear of her is gone. I gave her a box of chocolates this morning for UK mother’s day and she was very gracious. She was very ill with a cough and when I expressed my concern, she said that she would “work through it”. I imagine that this is how her life has been. A series of discomforts that this wonderful woman has chose to just work through.
You would never catch her picking her nose on the bus, but you would never see her abandon her station in life to ride in a taxi. For her, piety doesn’t seem like an option but a birth rite.