I noted yesterday’s comments. Please note mine: I fully intended to return today and finish this story. I love Martha Ballard.

AND I proceeded to prove it and to finish my balcony story—and then I lost it as I was about to save and publish. Aargh

I’ll try again….

I came across Martha Ballard when I was doing my reading for my book, Reading Between the LInes: The Diaries of Women (Key Porter Books, 1995) She was an 18th-century New England midwife who kept an account book recording her cases, turning it into a record of her daily life, including her complaints about her husband’s and her son’s neglect. I’ll quote from my book (fair usage), page 131:

“Martha Ballard had a continuing conflict and estrangement with her son Jonathan. Apparently Jonathan was a hot-tempered man, the cause of his own considerable troubles and Martha was a strong-minded woman, too proud to ask for help she felt should have been freely given. Martha expresses a universal complaint in a comment about her son: ‘It is very strange that men cannot behave like rationall human beings.”

Well, I wasn’t rational either. I made ineffectual sarcastic and not-so-sublte comments, hoping that my son would come forward.

Finally I complained.

"All you have to do is ask,” he said.

So I issued a direct order, but I did say please and later - thank you.

And my balcony got wrapped.

I still miss it. I can’t wait for spring.

But I keep trying. And will again.

There’s one thing (more than one!) that I’ve been wanting to say, ever since i closed the balcony. It is truly winter now and things are tucked away, stacked and wrapped. So sad to see it turn back from my summer home to a barren, cold, windswept slab of concrete attached to the side of the building. I have had different approaches and aids to the interment over the past sixteen years I’ve had it. At first it was easy because I was strong enough to lift the patio furniture myself, with the aid of a (female) friend. Things change. I grow old I grow old. Over the years I have had different solutions and different helpers, but never my older son. I began to pay for some of the services; getting things up and running also requires effort. I was told last spring that the staff (by appointment and well paid) did not do that kind of work any more. This fall I missed one wonderful neighbour whose wrapping and securing of the tarps on the furniture has for the last two years proved the most wind-proof packaging ever. He had a hernia operation so he was not available or able.

Time was passing. It was too cold to sit outside. I thought of Martha Ballard. And you. See, I’m so literate that I that I seem to experience life more fully in books than I do face to face, at least, I get my examples and clarity from the written word. Hence Martha Ballard.

And I’m about to be cut off by a tired battery. So I’ll go to bed too.

Anon.