"Handle With Care" Synchronicity

I don't know what's in the stars, but it's been a month of "everything is going wrong".  Or another way to put it would be that it's been one of those "lessons and learning experiences" months.

I returned to Tucson to find my mother with health problems.  A tooth went bad and had to be extracted.  The roommate/caretaker was impossible to live with, and I had to very gingerly and diplomatically find a new home for her, which ended up being expensive, although it ended well.

Or so I thought until I learned that the room she was in, the one she always had the windows and curtains closed in with the in-room air conditioner running..........was the same room she was chain smoking in, because she didn't want me to know she smoked.  My best room now smells like a bar................ever try to get deeply embedded cigarette smoke out of a room you rent to people who are often sensitive to smell?  It's an ordeal that involves painting every surface with a special sealant, and then re-painting, as well as renting an expensive ozone cleanser machine. Whew..........

So  last week I was surprised when I went to my car (in a parking lot) to see a pile of latex gloves all around the front of my car.  Latex gloves?  I picked them up, not being a person who wastes things, threw the mass into the back of the car, drove off.  But the sight of that pile of gloves on the parking lot by my car was so strange I couldn't help wondering if it had some kind of "symbolic value". 

A week ago a guest arrived who was going to stay a month in my guesthouse in the back.  I've always had such friendly experiences with the people who've stayed there.  But as soon as she moved in things got strange.  She complained, complained, complained, she sulked, she glared at me when she walked by, she said the neighbors were intrusive and noisy.  Since she paid in advance  I bent over backwards to appease her. I apologized several times for neighborhood noise.   I gave her 1/4th of the rent back in cash "for her inconvenience".  I told her I'd refund all if she wanted to find something else, and was told she had no where to go and was "stuck".

Then she took to blasting a radio toward my fence, to "get even" with the neighbors (who are very quiet). It took some talking down and  placating to deal with this, in the course of which I learned that she believes she is stalked by an invisible enemy, that no one believes her, and "they" get to her wherever she goes, including putting poison in her car every night.  After I talked her into calmness (and got the radio off), I retired feeling very sad at the endless suffering of this woman, who needed meds and help I could not provide,  and also frightened for myself, my other guests,  and my property.

With much careful effort, I managed to get her to leave without violence - handle with care, indeed, just like nurses must handle patients who are "infectious".  And I learned something about myself, and the need to not react and become "infected" by her emotional and psychological insanity.  Gloves are to avoid "infection", which means, reaction.

Last, I've spent the past day cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, the space this sad woman inhabited, which she left in bad shape, along with the challenging room the clandestine smoker left behind.    The gloves came in handy not only as metaphor, but literally.