Answering prayers…

When the gods want to punish you, they answer your prayers.

So tells us Karen Blixen, in Out of Africa.

If when I first watched the movie I didn’t get it (I was six or ten at the time), now as I recover from a mild flood in the kitchen, due to an unforseen strike from my washing machine, the quote dawns on me and rather makes sense. For twelve years have I been longing to have a home I could call my own. My own flat, my own realm. It took me long enough to achieve this goal, but two years ago, I got myself a tiny flat in the centre of suburbia. My prayers had been answered.

Sure enough, the first few months were blissful. I had works done on the flat, furniture was only the essential (another way to describe it is spartan decoration…) and things were running smoothly. This wasn’t meant to last: first a small tear in the sofa, then some paint cracking up, but that was all in the first 8 months or so. As new year arrived in 2010, then the punishment began: leak in corridor (some pipe, after almost 2 years decided to get loose), then another leak in the bathroom, catching a bit of the bedroom and ruining part of the closet. Then 2010 ended with a bang, literally: the bathroom closet just fell and crashed to one billion little pieces. All these problems are either solved and or on the way to being solved, but Sunday, as fate would have it, my washing machine broke. The tumbledry, was not tumbling nor drying. The water was not dimishing, but rather increasing – I had to take the filter out and mildly flood my own kitchen, my pièce de resistance.

So now, I’m left with a gaping hole in the bathroom ceiling, a depressing water stain the bedroom’s ceiling, a ridiculously small mirror on the bathroom wall (not big enough to cover the place where the closet used to be) and 5% of my cutlery set: 6 good spoons, 4 good forks, 1 and half knife (these have misteriously disappeared…).

Usually I’m the kind of person who sees a half-filled glass, rather than a half-empy one, but for now, a dry glass seems more appealing. I had my share of water these last months and I can only hope the gods had their fair share of punishment too. 

Namaste!