Kindness

My dyspraxia was worse than normal this morning. Now there are coffee grains all over the floor. A product of too loud a radio programme, feeling overwhelmed and hurrying. 

I know I’m going to drop something when those stars are in line.  

Usually a millisecond before it happens.

I’m sat quietly at the table Vernon Kay’s sweet Northern Chatter turned off and some quiet orchestral music on.

It’s the Portuguese Love Theme by Craig Armstrong

The gift of oak saplings made yesterday a nice day. The older I get these kindnesses mean so much more than they did when I was younger. Sure kindnesses are always nice when you are on the receiving end of them but when you are single , somehow they mean just that little bit more important and , well…….kind.

I posted on Facebook a blog about my plans to go to London soon recently and one of the replies was from my great niece Ellie who works in the capital asking to meet for coffee.

That touched me greatly.

Another text, this time from Affable Despot Jason , inviting me to his daughter’s 18th birthday party, the words, she really wants you to come, touched me greatly too as did Village Elder Ian’s recent offer to shrink my front garden gate to it will close properly.

Little kindnesses are of such importance

And so in a similar vein, I’m asking for some kindness from my “ troll” here on Going Gently. I’m asking for them to please stop provoking an argument out of nothing. 

I’m big enough and ugly enough to cope with such comments but the drip drip nature of them, usually in the most innocuous of blog entries has become somewhat  wearisome to say the least.

I’m also going to ask people not to react to any when and if they continue to arrive

After this personal request, I hope that will not be necessary.

My mother, for all of her faults, was a kind woman, all told. 

I remember when I was around 10, we lived in a large detached house on the corner of a busy road. On the opposite corner was a veterinary practice, built on the back of a residential house. One day she  had been watching a woman sat in a car outside for a while before she asked me to do her a favour . She had collected several roses from the garden and had wrapped silver paper around the stems and asked me to take them down to the lady in the car.

Being a shy child I refused , and being a shy adult she pushed herself to offer them to the woman in the car herself. When she returned, pink cheeked and sweaty, I asked her just why she had given roses to a stranger. And my mother said that the she had seen the woman take her elderly Labrador into the vets and had seen her return just with his lead.

The woman had been sobbing in her car, presumably after having the dog euthanised and my mother felt she had to do something to offset her pain, just a little.

It’s a big lesson to learn at 10

Not only that my mother was capable of such a small glowing act of kindness when she didn’t always act in a kind way at home.

But also that she was painfully shy and probably in need of such little kindnesses herself 

Ps

Strange thing serendipity 

This arrived this afternoon , many thanks Elaine