Should

It's an awful word. Should. I've struggled with it for many a year.

The internal voice.

As I'm sitting here, all the shoulds are piling up on top of me.

I have a PG** coming for two nights. She's from Switzerland. She's travelling the world. I debated taking her as technically I'm a shut shop until Spring. But then the water tank blew up, needed replacement in breach of the tight budget around here, and I thought (as I always do) don't worry about money so much when money is thrown in your face like this. Bad karma. Take it when it's offered. So I did.

Another friend just died, an expected death but still. She's in Ontario and has lived an extraordinary life. She would never have seen it that way, but the truly great don't. For example she devoted a couple of years of her life to working in a clinic in Africa to help FGM* victims and educate residents as to why this was so barbaric. She will be missed. I heard from her only a week ago.

Another friend has pretty much a terminal form of cancer.

The true cost of aging, as the old man said, your friends drop like flies around you.

The silken thread of memory gets severed, you carry the memories alone.

No, I'm not morose. Philosophical really.

I'm shoulding myself into making up the guest room and tidying the dining room where this long, long table gets so quickly covered in the detritus of my life. Oh yeah, and the bathroom. And the hall where my storm door was fixed and there's more detritus. And the living room and kitchen.....

And a deadline of reading a book for the Book Club (thick, tiny print, 400 pages).

And darkness comes so early, melancholia. A season for dying, truly.

I'm sure I can think of many other shoulds.

It's a bloody useless word.

It should be banned.

*female genital mutilation
**paying guest

PGs*

*Paying guests.

An advantage of having PGs is that it forces me to be tidy. And clean. And smiley. And to interact nicely with strangers.

Another is I get to meet people from a specific walk of life. These people are the non-Holiday Inn types who thrive on different types of vacations, take the road less used and are usually far more travelled, globally, than the norm. Interesting in other words. No CBs evah.

The couple with me at the moment are a case in point. They are spending a month in Newfoundland, two nights with me, and are seeing all the sights and soaking up the experience by using AirBnB when they can, getting to meet the locals on a one to one basis. Of course I throw everyone for a loop when I tell them I am Irish hatched, matched and dispatched to Canada. But when they recover they're interested in my journey from there to here.

I truly find life is all about stories. Theirs and mine. I soak them up. Current female PG is a choir master/music teacher. I asked about her unusual name and she tells me a story of her mother escaping from Poland post war. He is more reticent, an IT man, eagerly asking me if I had computers to sort. Where are these guys when you really need them, I think. But, knowing myself so well, I will get to the bottom of his life too.