Mrs Long

The year is 2002 and today I found out the Mrs Long passed away a couple of weeks ago.

Mrs Long was an extraordinary woman; her obituary was in today’s paper. She found herself in the position of being a single mother when her children were small because her husband died unexpectedly. After working and then eventually opening her own hairdressing salon, she remarried.

I first met Mrs Long when I took over a cleaning round from a friend of mine in the early eighties. As I got to know her it turned out that her sister was married to my dad’s cousin, after this I became sort of family. I would clean for her every week and she always had some fabulous morning tea for me to eat half way through the morning's work. Her husband was a gentleman of the old school, he would have been the perfect grandfather, he was always interested in what was going on in my life and had tales to tell about his sailing and other adventures he’d had over the years.

At morning tea, we’d talk and talk sometimes I had to really drag myself away if we weren’t talking footy or family we were swapping recipes. The one recipe she gave me that truly sticks in my head, as being hers is a caramel slice in fact, I would say it is the caramel slice to die for.

Polishing her wooden floor was always the same as I’m not what you call a small woman, I would get on my hands and knees and polish every inch of the floor and her comment was the same every week I don’t know how someone your size gets down there and does that for so long.

I wasn’t really that big, however, according to Mrs Long I was a big girl.

I enjoyed my time with Mrs Long and was saddened by her death. It seems that we are rapidly losing the people who made this city what it is today by hard work and struggle after the war years.