Last night, while I was painting the trim around the bay window, Meaghan brings me the phone and tells me it is my grandfather, for our monthly conversation. When we get past the hellos and brief health updates, he tells me that next Monday (“Not this monday, mind,” he tells me, “Monday next!”) he is getting on the bus at 9:45am and coming up here and I am to pick him up at the bus station promptly at 2pm.
Sad to say, my next immediate thought was, when are you leaving? 
And then he tells me he’s leaving on that Friday. Five whole days. My 88 year old hard-of-hearing fussily English grandfather. Here. Staying in my house.
He’s a dear, sweet man, and I love him deeply, but we haven’t lived in the same house together for…. almost twenty some odd years. (How’d I get so old?)
“I hear you have a big house,” he tells me. “I can sleep in the attic.”
Um, no. The attic is sweltering in the summer and unfinished, plus it is up three flights of stairs. I tell him he’s sleeping in Addison’s room, in the bed that used to be my grandmother’s. He’s tickled.
Now I have to clean and organize and do all the other stuff I was going to do that really needs to be done (and write! gah!) and I’d panic, but my schedule really is quite full now. Oy. What am I going to do with him while he’s here? What will I feed him?
I’m hoping that he’ll rise late and go to bed early, like some of the household. Then, I’m hoping that he’ll be content just to sit around a bit. He did say he may get me to drive him around to a place or two, but I know I won’t have to plan a non-stop extravaganza. I just have to be on call at all times to tend his every need.
Note to self: buy aged sharp cheddar and English custard. Scrub the teapot.
It’s called 
Can it wait till then? I have a dozen of things to write about including (top of the list) my entry on compassion for 
Follow me