Today’s been a blur and there was no time to work on the cottage. Instead I was on a strange mission that Muriel watched with interest and mild concern: in almost six years of being joined at the hip, she’d never before seen me tape trash bags to the bathroom ceiling at the behest of a stranger.
It was a wobbly enough endeavor — as you might’ve guessed, ’twas I that was rickety, not the step ladder — that she wisely backed up a respectable distance, then plopped down to enjoy as much of the show as she could glimpse before the door was closed.
Every bathroom in our house has the same mirrored medicine cabinet that’s been there since it was built in the 1930s. Though I can make my own medicine cabinets for the miniature whole-house replica I’m planning, mirror-crafting is beyond my abilities. On a lark, I reached out to a British miniature artist whose art deco pieces I admire and asked if she might be interested in recreating ours.
Happily, she was enthusiastic and we’ve been working together to iron things out. She’s so skilled that even the first rough draft she designed looked perfect, but she wanted a head-on photo of one of the mirrors with as little background noise as possible. “Hold up a bin bag,” she instructed, and if I were still in my old line of work I could’ve easily drilled the smallest of holes in a piece of white foam board and taken a near-perfect picture without almost falling backwards onto the toilet.
The bathroom’s narrow shape was more to blame for that tomfoolery than the brain gremlins sabotaging my nervous system. And speaking of brain gremlins, Crankenstein’s having trouble with hers — the same black clouds that roll in every spring have again found their way to her. Her depression is the sort that’s already fairly bad on a good day, so she’s not having fun. It was something I couldn’t help but consider when she asked if she could accompany me to next week’s Botox appointment.
“There’s a concern I want to mention,” she explained, a recent change she’s noticed in my speech. I’m not going to use the clinical term because a reader who checks in here sometimes has a raging case of health anxiety and if they look this up they’re liable to start freaking out when it inevitably happens to them. It’s common enough, like misplacing a word or substituting one that’s similar but incorrect. It happens more often when you’re frazzled or exhausted, two things I’ve been lately.
Because Crankenstein’s (already considerable) anxiety ramps up when she’s more depressed, I’d like her to wait until my hour-long PD checkup later this year to make sure this isn’t something ‘Niles’ has seized upon with his usual fervor.* I agree with her observation, but she misspoke several times herself within an hour of bringing it up — and, to her credit, laughed about it. A bigger litmus test for me is whether I can still express myself in writing, which has always come easier than mouth-yammering anyway.**
This was the steadiest photo I took and the miniaturist said it captured what she needed: a full view of etchings that are otherwise partially obscured. Which is sort of what this site is, too.
* Botox appointments are quick shoot-’em-up affairs that are supposed to have 15-minute allotments, some of which is spent charting and teaching trainees.
** Other than calling appliances ‘furniture’ a couple weeks ago, I think the correct words generally make it into my writing. (Knock wood.) Also, I should clarify that even if ‘Niles’ is correct, time isn’t of the essence; it’s not a treatable symptom.