Ah June. Dear, sweet June. Prettiest of them all. Welcome. I am reminded too of an older woman I once knew called June. “Mr McGarry”, she insisted on calling me, though I was half her age. It was embarrassing.
“Call me `Patsy’, June, please,” I would say. “What, Mr McGarry?,” she’d respond. “It’s `Patsy’, June, `Patsy’.” And she’d respond, “All right, Mr McGarry.” But she never did. It reminded me of an elderly lady in New York who, on principle, refused to call me “Patsy”. “It’s a girl’s name,” she insisted. Or “...a gurl’s name”, as she put it.
June used to clean my place back then, though “clean” is an exaggeration. It was a flat in one of those big, old houses you find in parts of Dublin, with my kindly landlady living upstairs. June called around once a week to give her place the once over. We’d say “hello” and that was it.
Then one weekend, when cleaning up my own place – a rushed job in preparation for a visit by my mother – I tripped on a matt, fell against the edge of a chest of drawers, gashed my forehead badly [the scar remains to this day], and bled profusely. Such blood sacrifice made a stone of my heart when it came to cleaning. I was never a fan.
RM Block
I contacted June, my angel of mercy, and she began to “clean” my place weekly after she had done the same for my landlady. A perfect arrangement. Even if “weakly” might be a more appropriate description for what June did. Bless her, she spared everything, except visible surfaces.
I attempted to alert her to this, without criticising her standards, but I was as successful at that as I was in persuading her to call me “Patsy”. I ended up “supplementing”, cleaning those places she would not reach, while avoiding the matt.
June has long since departed to that self-cleaning eternity in the sky where everyone is “Mr” and “Mrs”. For obvious reasons, she comes to mind at this time of the year. RIP.
On this the first day of a favourite month, welcome June, with its brimful of freshness, youth and possibility, its long days and warm evenings a reminder of why life is worth living.
June, from Latin Iuniu), a contraction of Iunonius, for “sacred to [goddess] Juno”.
