Finishing Off the Bar of Soap…

A few years ago, the final Christmas spent with my ex, my husband gave me a gift that might sound a bit strange. Coloured tissue tied with a string, inside were several dried up slivers of soap and a few nearly empty tubes of toothpaste.

My thriftiness had been a running joke in the household, the gift at the time did make me laugh. A very short lived giggle, the evening spilled over with awkwardness knowing that my husband had chosen to leave the marriage and would within weeks be moving out.

Not to say that I don’t appreciate high quality goods and services and accept that they’re priced accordingly, the point that was being reiterated  with the gift was that I didn’t care for wastage of whatever item good money had been spent on. I admit that I could be a nag about food being eaten up before it spoiled, or getting annoyed at finding toothpaste in the bathroom garbage that had more than a few good squeezes left in the tube, or soap being replaced while the current bar still had a few days of usefulness left in it.

This thriftiness didn’t grow out of the period when I’d left home as a teen and ate ramen noodles meal after meal out of necessity, it had come much earlier from the lessons learned from a mother and her sisters who’d been young girls in Germany during World War II.  Food and provisions at times was scarce, and no matter how poor the condition the item was used or eaten.

The experiences of one generation passed on to become habits of the next.

I smile when my daughter also tries to get the very last bit of toothpaste out of the tube, when I go into the shower and a usable sliver of soap waits for me to finish it off. When she reminds me that there’s food in the fridge that needs eating up.

My need to finish things off is making life a bit complicated. I can’t clean up all the loose ends that I’d like to before I go, as much as I’m trying.

Including this blog. It’s been gently suggested by a few friends that I write my last entry in advance, to be posted by Suzanna after my passing. No matter how hard I try, I just can’t do it for the tears that flow. If it hasn’t yet come across in the last few years of writing this blog how grateful I am for the blessings in my life, I haven’t done a very good job and wouldn’t expect to be able to sum it up in just one post.

My plan is to wrap the blog up over the next few weeks. It’s time. There are some things I’d like to share before I stop writing here, some things that might surprise, delight, or sadden you. I need to tie up this loose end, to give you an ending to the story as best I can. Suzanna has promised that news that I can’t share myself will be posted; it saddens me when I read a blog written by someone who’s terminally ill and it ends suddenly with no news of what happened to the individual I grew to care about.

I can’t do that to the many of you who’ve faithfully followed my blog over the last years. We won’t leave you without the final chapter.