Words for Wednesday (on Thursday)

Words for Wednesday is a weekly meme with words or picture prompts given
Bloggers are encouraged to make what they can of them

This month (May) Elephant’s Child is providing the prompts on behalf of a friend
This is how I used them this week

I don’t believe it….

Joanne was having technical issues with her computer. She really wanted to enter all the information her Aunt Dora had provided on her last visit. Her mother’s sister had been so helpful, a real treasure trove, full of facts and figures, family names, place names, dates of marriages as well as births and deaths, Snippets of this that and the other given freely and seemingly willingly.

Reflecting on that afternoon, Joanne decided Aunt Dora was becoming a bit of a recluse – she had complained constantly about the staff at Far Horizons, which was the retirement village where she was now living. Honestly, with her temperament being the way it was there was no wonder the other residents avoided her……. leaving her to spend more time alone in her suite of rooms.

What Joanne, staff and the other residents didn’t know was that Aunt Dora was scared..which ironically seemed a strange emotion for someone who unbeknown to her family, had lived and thrived on a life of danger for many years.

The so called glamorous position…..the one they knew about….the one she had held for all those years, which supposedly involved buying and selling hadn’t been quite what it seemed.

The (lucky you, they said) travelling to visit various overseas manufacturers also brought with it a little bit of worry, worry that her miniature camera would fail…. worry she wouldn’t get the ‘extra’ information her bosses had asked for…… worry she’d be caught…..worry she’d be seen stretching this way and that to surreptitiously take the photos of the new designs her employer wanted to get his hands on.

Now in her later years and long retired, she often wondered about some of those work colleagues. A chance meeting with a distant cousin at the funeral had put her on edge with everyone in her life.  Through his law practice and clubs frequented he often came in contact with some of those same colleagues who….knowing his connection to Dora…would often mention a long ago law suit that never quite made it to court.

Something to do with industrial espionage!

As Dora sat quietly in her comfortable arm chair,  in a dressing gown the colour of buttercups she’d once seen in a meadow, she looked at the slippers on her feet and chuckled. ‘They definitely wouldn’t have helped me scarper if I’d been caught all those years ago’

Then she grimaced, looked at the clock and wondered where the staff were. No wonder she was tetchy with everyone They definitely were late with her medication.  The doctor had recommended increasing the dosage to alleviate the constant chronic pain and she needed it.  Needed it right now!

Next stop palliative care and all that that involves.  Will this ever be over? She thought to herself.

In the mean time I’ll maybe draft up my own personal eulogy . That’ll give them something to think of.

I can just hear Joanne – Aunt Dora?  She did what?  I don’t believe it!