In a break from established part of the daily ritual, the housekeeper, the chatelaine of my manor, if you will, appeared at my office door, a mug of tea in hand, with, unusually, a mildly strained look in her eye.  A glance at the clock on the screen told me I was late. Absorbed as I had become in the doings, ravings, and ratiocinations, of netizens of varying degrees of literacy and coherence, I had not noticed how time had flown while I was having fun.

Accepting the proffered mug, I gathered the rest of the walk-in-the-the-garden paraphernalia, namely, smoking materials of one sort or the other, I quit the premises, her protestations notwithstanding, hurriedly.

I should probably explain.

Em, the housekeeper has been keeping my house, which is to say, doing, and re-doing, all those things that I as a single male, living alone, find onerous, or at best, postpone-able; to wit, dusting,  folding, fluffing, and putting things back where they belong. Not, I’ll admit, an insubstantial body of work. And she has been doing so for a good many years. With nary a complaint and only the occasional, now infrequent, strained-eye hints that there was behavior that could stand a re-think.

Which doesn’t make things very much clearer, does it?

It’s like this...Em’s pre-departure routine is as follows – 1) make the appropriate sounds that let Saar (I sometimes worry about how much that word sounds like the vernacular for gravy), nonetheless, let Saar (Sir, for the linguistically challenged among us) know that it was time to vacate the room. 2) place mug of fresh tea on table by the door, so that Saar can grab it on his way out the door. 3) use the smaller of the two smallest rooms of the house in decent and discreet privacy for the necessaries. 4) leave.

And there’s me, lost in the UTC ether.

I couldn’t even apologize for the thoughtfulness ‘cuz, y’know, that would be an acknowledgement of her need for the bathroom.

Why she can’t use the master bathroom I am unable to understand beyond murmuring cultural artifact to myself. Sigh.