Credits: Vicki Stegall
Font: Freefatfont
Scraplift: Muse gig on the Malieveld by @[26223
Nickel] <https://oscraps.com/community/media/muse-gig-on-the-malieveld-the-hague.379739/>
Journaling:
As far as I can tell my mom, who passed away at age 93, never threw anything away. When I travel to my family home - usually to assist with respite care - I fill the trash can with carefully-dated decades-old stuff wrapped in disintegrating plastic bags. In one of her purses I once found a library card that belonged to my brother, who is now in his fifties, when he was in grade school. And there are many duplicates - a half dozen bottles of the same decades-old furniture polish - it seems as if she'd forgotten to check her supplies before purchasing more.
So it wasn't surprising to find a hot water bottle stained with age around its sides, attachments for a douche/enema kit - plus at least a half dozen hot water bottle stoppers saved from older bottles. It didn't seem worth my time to test the integrity of the decades-old rubber, so I tossed the lot into the wastebasket.
A morning or two later I woke to the sound of water running throughout the house. No water came out of any faucets because a 20-inch water main down the hill had broken, leaving entire neighborhoods without water. In the garage there were bottles filled decades previously with tap water for emergency use - completely unsuitable for drinking, but potentially useful for wetting down dishes and handwashing. At my own home in earthquake country, we'd have rigged an emergency handwashing station with bleached water, but what to do while by myself here? I fished the hot water bottle and douching attachments out of the trash and tested a handwashing rig. Amazingly, there were no leaks.
Water service was restored before I actually needed to use the old hot water bottle, but I wrapped serviceable parts in a baggie, labeled it with the purpose for which it was being saved and put it back in the cupboard. My mom was probably laughing from heaven.