When the shower nurse comes to shower Ray on Thursdays and put him through his exercises I go down to visit my friend who is having chemo for her cancer and we have a cup of coffee together. She only lives just down the street so I can walk there in five minutes. We laugh and joke, share family stories ( I knew her sisters and some of her nieces I went to school with) and so it is a very pleasant hour. Despite a fairly grim prognosis she is just taking each day as it comes and trying to live a "normal" life. I really admire her for the matter-of-fact way she is handling the chemo. She says things like: "I only have two bad days so that means I have five good days every week." Boy, I wish I could bottle that attitude and sell it!

We were discussing this morning how our neighbourhood has changed. We have both lived here on and off for forty years so we have seen a lot of changes. I was complaining about the number of people who let the verge between their house yard and the road fill up with clover. Today with spring well under way I was walking along and kicking bees out of the way as they collected the honey from the flowering clover. In my youth the man-of-the-house would have had that all mown and tidy and no clover allowed in the lawn, just green, smooth, well looked after grass.

There was pride in how you maintained the house and its surrounds back then. We didn't have much money and our furniture and our clothes were often hand-me-downs but we kept ourselves and our surroundings dusted and polished and we were "respectable". My Dad only had a low paid job for most of my pre-teen years and they had a mortgage to pay off but we never went without. There was always what Mum called "good, wholesome food" for us to eat. So if the neighbour grew turnips and we grew beans we swapped and so the casseroles had very little meat in them but a whole lot of turnips and carrots and onions and we were hungry enough to eat it all up.

Now Ray and I are on a restricted income it doesn't seem so hard. We are pretty economical to run! We eat simple food, I keep clothes laundered and dry them in the sun, we don't go far from home usually so we can live with the high cost of petrol (gas). We even manage to save up and go on the occassonal night-out with the family and maintain our fees in the Lions Club though I wonder why it costs so much to do acts of charity sometimes. I know a lot of people on pensions do struggle so I guess, for both of us, our frugal upbringing is now paying dividends. Unlike today's generations we were not brought up in an "I gotta have it NOW!" world.

Ray and I are managing with his new restrictions. I make him "shakes", thickened milk drinks that he seems to like. A friend asked him if he missed his "cup of tea" and he said not really. I am lucky he is so easy in what he eats and drinks, well mostly anyway. The overall cost of running a household with an invalid is higher, in extras like padded undergarments, extra laundering, food thickener, extra milk, more tender therefore more expensive cuts of meat etc. We have a co-pay for medicines and a "contribution" for our in-home care and a "fee" for Daycare so that is extra. But we can no longer live an extravagant lifestyle so I guess that is a saving eh? Trip to Paris? Sorry! Lunch at the best hotels? Probably not.

And I am fortunate that Trev, like us, is a bargain hunter so if he sees a sign for cheap vegetables by the side of the road near a farm gate in he goes and comes home in triumph with his purchase. Trays of three dozen eggs from the Egg Shed cost the same as two dozen from the supermarket and are very fresh, well a day old compared with six to eight weeks old. So eggs boiled, scrambled and used in fried rice and pancakes etc are good food for a "change". And I grow some herbs and change the flavours of sauces and make savoury dishes that way. Trev is also excellent at BBQ's so that fills our summer with special dinners as well.

I love to bargain hunt in the shops too so "never" buy today what might be on special next week. And we have a large chest freezer we have had for twenty years or more that I fill with my cooked and frozen bargains so a cheap price for ground meat can be translated into saving for weeks to come. We come from the generation that learned to save and we do live cheaper than a lot of people can who never learned to make a dollar stretch. I hope my Scottish ancestors appreciate the "canny" shopper I have become...lol.

So back to where I started. I miss having a husband who would sit on the front grass and dig up all the clover and broad leafed weed so our lawn was a picture of neatness in the summer. Now with just me to do the work it is never as pristine as it used to be. At my age I have learned to accept that there are things I cannot manage to do now. And that means sometimes lowering what I think of as my "standards". And that is not always easy.