Sunday, February 19

 

 

When we wake up we will see the weather starting to clear and Spring beginning to emerge. We will dress and Irma will drive straight to Lanterna to get some boxes for Auo’s old room. Yesterday we moved a lot of stuff out and began reconfiguring it. Today it needs to boxes to get reconfigured into.

We have brunch when Irma gets back and then we leave to collect Naa and drive to see her grandfather. Parking proves no easier (and no harder) than usual, and so we walk back a couple of blocks from the space we found. On the way I see a bright blue stone which causes Naa and Irma to cry in unison, “Haven’t you seen it before? It has been there months!”. No I have not, I reply, and to demonstrate the point I stop and photograph it. The wind blows and so I do not stop to check if someone has painted the stone or not. I may do that next time.

After chatting with Irma’s father we will head off back to Ikea, which pleases Naa because she loves the 50c Ikea hot dogs.

I discovered this morning that the holes in the Billy range of furniture have changed in the last five years. The fittings for the old Billy furniture will not work with the bookcases I made this week. This matters because we bought a new glass shelf to replace a shelf in the old shelving system, and we want to use the old shelf in the new system. Why would anyone change the size of the holes in a shelving system that Ikea have manufactured since 1979, when Gillis Lundgren, IKEA’s fourth employee, designed them on a paper napkin?

Apparently Ikea changed them in 2011 and again in 2014. We must have bought our old shelving in 2010, then.

Irma will explain all to customer services, who will provide us with new fittings, Naa will have her hotdogs, I will have one too, and we will purchase one more Billy shelf.

I will spend the evening assembling shelves and putting content back onto them. By the time I go to bed the room will look a lot airier than it did before, and everything will have a better place than it did before. In doing all of this Irma will find a to-do list in one of Auo’s books, planning to rearrange her room, and making clear that we would have to carry out this exact process even if she had not died.

The list includes the items: rearrange Barbies, throw out ALL Bratz. Somehow these will remind me of her intensely. They seem so her.