A Month's Recycling.

 A car full of dog food cans, packaging and glass bottles.

Number 2 son visited down here in his new to him 7 seater car and suggested I might want to take the recycling I stored in the back of J's Berlingo.  It had given up the ghost a week or two before her passing.

Like most household routines like paying bills and housework and cooking and cleaning and washing .  J took on a multi task of roles.  It's been an awful difficult few weeks trying to know where anything is or where to pay the electricity.? I spent four hours  looking for birth and marriage certificates.  I wish someone would write a booklet for grieving widowers on how to manage house affairs.  Do you know where your marriage certificate is Mr?

I was mainly in charge of the outside of the smallholding, gardening, mucking out the ponies and pigs, chopping wood and carrying anything heavy.  Oh and burying dead rats, removing spiders and catching a bat that had flown down the chimney.  " Just get it outside"  J once screamed at me😊.

I couldn't believe how many bags of recycling I had crammed into the little van in the last month.

We took it to the waste recycling centre in Bantry and paid 3 Euros.  I wonder how much we pay individually for our packing and dog food cans and glass bottles?

We came home and filled up the car with the " Return" beer cans and plastic bottles and took them to Lidl and it was closed.  They had no electricity.  So we drove to Super Valu and started to put each individual can and plastic bottle in the return deposit machine.  We took the paper receipt to the check out and got back 22.50 Euros in cash.  

It's a pity they don't have a return machine for pet food and tinned food and glass bottles.  Are the supermarkets only interested in metal and plastic that makes money like Aluminium beer cans?

Sheep Near The Sheepshead Way.

 It's been a beautiful day today on our peninsula down here in West Cork.  

Thank you all so much for your heartfelt comments at the parting of my  children's motherand my beloved wife.

The funeral service was so beautiful and the Canon conducted it with such skill and kindness and he read our Eulogies.  One wrote by myself and one by our youngest son.

We had traditional hymns like All Things Beautiful and The Day Though Gavest Has Ended and I chose some popular music favourites by Paloma Faith, Chris De Burgh, Heart, The Beautiful South and Whitney Houston.  There was a lot of tears shed that service, mine included.

I not only lost my wife I lost my friend and chauffeur and fellow carboot sale Womble.  It's  difficult getting to town with a very limited Local Link bus service on a Tuesday and Thursday which went last Thursday through the flooded boreens and twenty odd miles picking up four of us.  It cost me 6 Euros including the return fare.   Thankfully the return journey is less than six miles home.

I have got back into walking again.  The Saturday after the funeral I visited J's grave and walked thirteen miles via Durrus and back home.  

I am also reading a book by CS Lewis called A Grief Observed.  It's brilliant and only cost me 74 Cents to download on Kindle.

The last month is probably the hardest month of my life and I like all of us have been through some very difficult times.  I don't know why God took my wife.  I know she wouldn't want to be separated from us.  I had nearly thirty one years of happily married life and she gave me two wonderful sons.

Thanks again.