Monday

Back to brilliant sunshine, warm but not hot temperatures -- the kind of weather that makes you feel guilty for not doing something about it! Go wild! Stay outside!

And yet, here I am, inside, catching up on the essentials.

I do go out early enough, when it was still so cool that I need a sweatshirt. And I weed some. Around the sheep shed. Around the courtyard.

And though we have breakfast on the porch, it's barely comfortable. A bit nippy I would say. Again, I chase the sun around the table.

Then I spend the better part of the morning at my mother's place.

She's not coherent today. Yes, she sleeps, but in her half-wakefulness, she cannot formulate whole words. Whatever sounds and gestures she makes are not happy ones and they show no indication of peace. I try giving water, but that only heightens her anxiety. The nurse later tells me that when they gave medicines, she recoiled, being sure that she was being poisoned by the cruel and vengeful staff. We decide to discontinue the meds she has been on for decades, in favor of increasing all that stuff that will lessen her anxiety, though if you are working with an inherently paranoid person who trusts no one except herself (possibly me, but only because she has no choice...), shutting that down is not easy.

As I wait to see if she will regain some awareness (she does not), I look around her room. I've moved her four times now in the last half dozen years. Even early on, when I asked her to list the things she wanted for sure to be moved to a new place and I kept to that list and then some, she'd frown at all that I left behind. Understandably, I suppose. She was a bit of a hoarder and she kept papers, lists and tallies of everything. Notes on every medication she ever swallowed (and there were many), notes on doctors visits, on every blood pressure measurement -- I tossed most of it in the last move. She didn't need it, but she was convinced otherwise.

In my selection of things to bring to the hospice nursing care rooms, I packed her precious notebook that she has had with her, updated each year, since 1954 -- i.e. the year after I was born. I find this notebook today and I leaf through it.

Each page (sometimes more than one page) is filled with titles of books she read that year. 

My mother never got a college degree, but though she lamented over her family's poverty which she claimed stood in the way of her continuing her education, she never thought that this should keep her from joining the "cultured world" (her love of those words!). She did it through reading and listening to classical music. It was enough for her and she was proud of the fact that she always finished every book she ever started. (Only later did I understand that she loved the act of reading, even as so much of the content passed her by.) 

There's much to admire in that list, including the fact that she read a lot when my sister and I were babes, living at my grandma's. In 1955, when I turned two and my sister turned four, my mom read 29 books and they were no lightweight trash. Pushkin, Hemingway, Maugham, Lessing, Hawthorne, Melville. In 1982, the year after I had her move (for a while) to Madison because my father left her, she topped out at 100 books. The break up of her marriage upped her reading hours. And it's all there. In that notebook. I thought about how I never saw her sit back enjoying a book. And yet, she read. Somewhere, somehow she found the time. And recorded her accomplishment. (Six years are left empty. 1961-1966, when she was the ambassador's wife in New York. No reading then. Plenty of sewing, shopping for bargains, ladies lunches and evening receptions. No books.)

But eventually, the music listening stopped (she blamed her hearing -- I could not convince her to keep it going). And then the reading stopped. In 2022, at ages 98 and 99, she read her last four books of her life: To Kill a Mockingbird, Free (a memoir given to her by an assisted living neighbor, about living through the end of communism in the Balkans), Anton the Dove Fancier (a World War 2 collection of stories about the Holocaust), and finally Like a Swallow. She decided that she couldn't read books anymore after that. Her eyesight was too poor, her concentration not there anymore. Was it a sweet ending to her long life of reading? Probably not. She had mixed feelings about LAS. Good story telling, but insufficient recounting of the tragedy of life. Fair point. I never thought that either my life or hers was tragic. She disagreed.

I leave her now, assured once again that her opioids would be upped, her anxiety quelled. I wonder if she will regain her awareness, or if yesterday's questions (mom, testing to see if I'm Nina: what do you call your grandmother? me: Babcia. mom: No! you cannot call her, because she is dead!) will have been the last time we will have talked.

 

At home, Ed suggests we walk the farmette lands and assess the trees he planted. I tell him no -- I have no time! I have to make more calls, get ready for the kids! 

Listening to myself, I recoiled. I sounded panicked. I sounded like my mother. 

Let's go. I changed my mind. I love walking the farmette with you.

He proudly showed me the height of some of the nut trees...

 

And we looked to see which of the pines and firs, planted this spring, needed to be replaced. (Just two!) And we tasted the pears and apples in the new orchard. And I felt happy.

Ready to pick up Snowdrop. Just her today. For the first time, her violin comes to school with her. In fourth grade they start orchestra.

And this is what she talks about. Because, well, orchestra is social. She has been "playing" violin for three years now and she has stuck with it even though it's not her favorite activity, and finally she turns to it with friends and suddenly, it's fun.

(On the way home, I let her get a scoop of Culver's.)

 

 

There's another activity she has stuck with for very many years -- ballet. Monday eve is the scheduled class for the oldest kids (in this particular studio). Off she goes, while my daughter and I use the time to sit down and catch up.

I come home late. Just as the sun is setting on our rural road. It's been such a full day!

 

 

with love....