A few years ago, for Christmas, all the women of the family got together and cleaned Maggie's apartment. One of the perils of losing your eyesight is not being able to adequately clean your environment. For example, you wipe the counter but you can't really tell that you missed a spot or a lot of spots. The kitchen grit accumulates and forms a protective dirt coating on your counter, hypothetically.We all took a room; I was stuck with the kitchen. One of the smaller rooms, but I was the last to finish. Mostly because I had to beg my grandmother to throw away the tins (plural) of rock hard marshmallows. Of course, if New Hampshire is buried in snow, and my grandmother starves for want of marshmallows, I'm gonna feel real guilty.
Eventually, my mother and aunt hired someone to come clean the house biweekly.
You know how the old person cliche is to accuse the housekeeper of stealing? I got this story from my aunt over Thanksgiving hors d'oeuvres.
"The house cleaners stole two pairs of my boots," Maggie asserts.
"Where were they?" my aunt asks.
"On the floor...in a garbage bag."
They've also taken her back scrubber. Because you know these are the kinds of things people steal.
9 comments:
I know exactly what you mean. We just hired a maid service for my Grandfather (93 years young). We also tried to get him physical therapy because he is unsteady on his feet. When the lady from social services saw him walking with the walker, they told him that he was in too good of health and that he didn't qualify for physical therapy! Can you imagine?
My grandma always thought people took her food - sometimes it was just so old she didn't think it was what it had originally been - yuck!
My grandmother ALWAYS thought everyone was stealing from her...even FAMILY!!
As she slipped in to dimensia (still driving) she thought the people at the post office were going to do "it". I once asked her what "it" was and all she could say was "well, you know."
Thanks for sharing.
This post reminds me so much of my grandmother. She couldn't see properly to clean and her flat was always mucky :( She lived in sheltered accommodation, so was supposed to get help with cleaning, etc, but she hated other people doing things for her, wouldn't even let my dad (her son) clean up or anything, so the carers had a bit of a hard time.
Oh and the stealing thing - she insisted on numerous occasions that someone had been into the flat and taken her purse, her pension book, you name it - anything she couldn't find had been stolen. Even if Dad eventually found the missing item under the bed or wherever she'd put it, she would still tell everyone that it had been pinched :(
My mom was a pretty meticulous housekeeper and it was tough for me to see her at this stage. If she knew how dirty her kitchen really looked sometimes, it would have mortified her! I did a lot of surreptitious cleaning.
Lol about stealing back scrubbers.
We have a trash compacter that we NEVER use. I started "using" it for dirty kitchen towel laundry storage. When I washed towels I grabbed them from the compactor. Gradually we started "losing" towels. No, I didn't think the cleaners were stealing them. But eventually we realized that if they were in the compactor, they thought they were TRASH. Sigh.
Thanks for the newest Maggie story. She is just so special.
Oh those were the days..."those people have stolen my glasses", etc. Back scrubber, huh?
My sister has a maid. She comes in once a week, maybe every other week, I can't remember. For a while the maid brought someone with her to help out. The "assistant" maid stole inexpensive, mundane things--like the drain cover from the shower. What the? Of course, it could have been worse, and maybe she was testing the waters for bigger things. My sister banned the assistant from her house. Weird.
Random tidbit: Blogger's word verification never shows up the first time I comment on a Blogger blog. I've taken to amusing myself by guessing what I can't see. This time I guessed speckal. I was wrong. The new word is polical, which I wouldn't have guessed, either.
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