Wednesday

In the middle of the night Ed, who has been scrunched somewhere under a quilt on the couch downstairs comes up and tells me -- I guess I better go to the doctor. Within five minutes, I'm driving him to the Emergency Room of our local hospital.

The thing is, I have been with Ed for nearly 19 years and he has never had to go to the doctor. Fine, he did go to an eye doctor for cataract removal, and he did have to get a primary physician because the eye surgeon mandated that he list one, but he can't remember her name. Check ups? Nope, never. I have two thoughts now: it must be serious for him to ask to go get medical help, and secondly -- what on earth will they unlock in that cavernous body of his once they start lookin' around? I mean, he's not been checked for anything. He could be a heap of deteriorating flesh and I wouldn't know it. Indeed he wouldn't know it either, until pain struck. And yesterday, pain struck.

My third thought is: this is not going to be a normal day.

There's a big fat beautifully round moon out when we drive the empty roads to town. Oh, it's the harvest full moon, and it's a supermoon tonight! There was a partial lunar eclipse as well, just a couple of hours earlier. Did the werewolves come out and howl? I consider pulling off the road and taking a picture, but that seems totally unsympathetic to the guy next to me who is, after all, in pain.

We have three hospitals in Madison and they are all very good. Which one? -- I ask Ed, knowing fully well that he has no idea. I explain -- door no. 1 is the closest. You go there if every second counts. Door number 2 is the fastest turnaround. (It's where I go 95% of the time.) Easy to get to and unless you're really ill, you're out within a few hours. Door number 3 is where you go if you think you have an incurable disease and you want the docs to come up with one last remote strategy to keep you alive. (It's our research hospital.) 

He picks door no. 2 and I am relieved. It means he's not especially worried. But then, does that guy ever worry, about anything?

 

By sunrise we know the verdict: kidney stones. More than one actually. We drive home as the sun rises to the east and the now faint moon moves closer to the horizon to the west. 

I have several satisfying thoughts now: first of all -- yay. The man's not hugely sick and certainly not near death's door. Secondly -- I taught him how to use the health care system and he is turning out to be quite the fan! He makes the requisite appointments going forward, pops a pill for pain (wow, these things work! -- he tells me, as if surprised), marvels at how smooth the whole process was for him (and gripes endlessly about how insufferable it is to fill out paperwork for meds, given our complicated insurance system). And thirdly -- I could not help but throw in a big I told you so. I have been telling him for years that he doesn't drink enough during the day. The doc's words? Drink more and cut back on protein such as nuts, beans, eggs.... Ha! You have just described Ed's preferred diet!

As I come back from the morning animal walk and get my solo breakfast ready once again...

 

 

...I do mumble something about it being one big mess of medical issues and chores for me and wouldn't it be nice if we did something special together.

Gorgeous, we do stuff together all the time!

No, I mean something special...

But it's the small stuff that's important. You know how I am most grateful for the everyday things we have going. Like indoor plumbing. You know I always express gratitude for indoor plumbing...

Yes, I know, but I dont want to be just like the toilet for you!

Why do you need all these extras? 

I dont need extras. Maybe just a little something out of our routine. With you.

But honestly, I can't think of what that would be. Our routines define my days and make them shine. They're brilliant in their ordinariness. I wouldn't trade them for the world.

I think about all this as I water the pots and tubs and a few of the younger plants. It is soooo dry out there! We may finally get a few showers next week. No one will be upset with cloudy wet skies. Least of all me.

I pick up the kids. 

 

 

 

We eat ice cream, because it is, yet again, a very warm and sunny day.

(many spirited games of tic tac toe)

(then on to the farmhouse)

 Toward evening, I take them to the meetup point. Sandpiper's school. It's always good to see him for a few minutes at the end of the day.

(both bros trying to get her off the bike rack)

And now I am home. Ed is popping Motrin and riding his bike again, I'm cooking chili. With beans, but hey, no one's giving up entirely on protein. And the sun sets and I am plenty tired, so goodnight! Until a more calm and normal tomorrow!

Tuesday

Ah well, I suppose in life, there's no such thing as a normal day. Usually that's a good thing. Every day brings something new, unique, refreshingly original to the table. That kind of oscillation between unpredictable events, encounters, moments, is fantastic, right? If the days would all just repeat themselves you'd go nuts. Nonetheless, I would have enjoyed just a few boring, repetitive ones, given that the first couple of weeks in September were on the extreme side of unusual. After all, your mother dies only once in your lifetime, unless it's one of those episodes where the person dies and then miraculously revives and writes a book about what death felt like. Hey, Anne Strainchamps, who often does stories about bizarre events, recently interviewed such a person on National Public Radio! It was a very weird interview. 

So, as you may guess from the above, I did not have a boring old normal day. Instead, I woke up to a sick Ed.

Now, given our age, and given the fact that we're walking breathing humans, sickness is going to make an appearance here, like it or not. But Ed is rarely sick and when he is, there immediately arises for me the Problem of the Unknown Malady. He always tunes out completely, sleeps through the day and night, looks like death itself, hates to be questioned about his ailments, and refuses to go to see a doctor to identify what exactly is wrong with him. Today, I do not think he is contagious, but really, who can tell. He is just plain sick and out of it and very very quiet, because, well, this is how he has survived for 73 years and this is the way he will continue until life totally drains out of him. Which, we're hoping, will not happen in the immediate future. Believe me, a dying Ed would be Trauma Supreme for me. We're not going there!

I walk to take care of the animals...

I eat breakfast, alone of course...

And then I sit in the farmhouse and watch him feel miserable from whatever Unknown Malady has struck.

[Alright, I do engage in time-killing  activities during these hours. For example, I read David Lebovitz' monthly piece on life -- and food -- in France. This is always entertaining. This time he described some of the bad meals he had on his vacation in the south of France. People are always surprised that the French should tolerate and keep in business places that serve awful food, but the fact is, restaurants, especially those in small towns, aren't just there to show off the talents of local chefs. For one thing, talented local chefs dont typically stay put in small villages. These eateries are, as David reminds you, places for people to gather and spend time together. Food is secondary, if you can believe it, to conviviality. As I am so often the ONLY solo diner in a French restaurant, I often wonder what happens to the introverts who have the misfortune to be born in France or Italy or Spain? Do they never go out to eat? I rarely see them. Never in these small town eateries. The push to socialize in these countries is strong. Not sure I could take a steady diet of dining with friends, family, colleagues, dogs even! I like the occasional quiet meal.]

Eventually I can't stand the sickly farmhouse quiet anymore and go outside to weed. You know how desperate I am to leave the room if I am out weeding in September. (Typically gardening is not what I think about this month.)

By afternoon I insist that he disappear from the living room, I air the place out and go get the kids.

 

("hurry up, gaga, I want to beat her to the farmhouse!")

(clearly the message "life is not a race" has not sunk in...)

Happy twosome. Nice distraction from the NEW elephant in the room! Well, out of the room actually. Remember -- I chased him over to the sheep shed.

Evening quiet -- too quiet! You know how when you are well and content you can hear the presence of someone in the room even when they're not talking, but when one of you is ill, suddenly the noise around you changes? Now, Ed does say he is feeling better and he can actually move, which is fantastic. But since I dont know what hit him, I have a bit of a wait and see attitude about all of it. I'm definitely hoping that tomorrow I'll wake up to a boring Wednesday. Would be nice....

a new week

And wouldn't you know it -- our school district is starting in on just the third week of classes, only to have a day off for the kids today. My help with this is needed but on a somewhat different schedule and with a different list of assignments. 

But first, the morning walk, which shows off those red crab apples -- such a beautiful image of fall!

 

(I coaxed this new Clematis all spring and summer long... so it decided to take this moment to throw out a bloom... Clematis vines are like that...)

We have one more warm and sunny week before us and I am so going to ignore the drying garden and take in the last warmth of the year. It's shorts weather! 

And breakfast on the porch weather.

Now comes the schedule change. I have a doc appointment in the late morning, and it happens to be in the vicinity of the young family's home. I dont want to drive back and forth many times and so I take my laptop and go to a coffee shop afterwards and sit and wait there until it's time for me to claim a child who is my responsibility for a big chunk of the day.

I will always love cafe moments. With a book, or my computer, my milky coffee. With an eye out to who else is there, puzzling over what might be the story behind their own coffee moment, what brought them here, alone or with a compadre, to share space in this way.

Five days ago, I came to this same coffee shop in need of quiet time, in need of relief. Today, I realized I need absolutely nothing. Not a rest, not an escape, not a vacation, not alone time, not more time, not less time. Nothing. I remember when my grandpa died, my mom was so distressed by his final days (in a Polish hospital) that after his death, she checked herself into a sanatorium for a month. In Poland, sanatoria were the way to luxuriate and regain a balance, a physical or mental acuity. Europe had plenty of sanatoria, mineral soaks and therapies, and vacation rest homes that offered healing remedies to traumatized souls and bodies. I believe my dad went to one as well when his mom or dad (or both?) died. And here I am, not needing anything at all -- just more of life as usual, the same old Ed, kids, grandkids, friends, mornings on the porch, evenings on the couch.

Speaking of kids, I am charged with taking Snowdrop to the mall on a shopping errand (something she needs for school) today. But when I pick her up, she wants a rewrite of the day: can we shop on line and go instead to the farmhouse?

 

 

I love how everyone loves the farmhouse. How no one minds that the stove top could use a good wipe-down and the flowers are already dry and the playroom isn't exactly in ship shape order and Ed's pile of who knows what is forever there, by the couch and yet, the farmhouse is heaven. Maybe because it imposes no burdens or expectations, no work, really nothing at all. Here's where you come to do whatever it is that you want to do, and you can be quiet or loud (though not too loud!), by yourself or with others and no one will care. 

With Snowdrop, I read of course. We finish Number the Stars and that just chokes me up. The courage of a nation under siege. Children taken from parents, losing family members left and right. What do we, most of us, know of courage here, in our comfy homes with warm water and internet access? I have always remembered this, growing up when I did in Poland: I was born after that war. An incredible piece of good fortune. 

We finish the book, she eats lunch, goofs around with Ed. She never laughs with me as much as she does with him. She provokes him, he fights back, just enough to let her understand her own limitations. (Sometimes, but not very often, I have to remind him to go easy on her, but she never minds when he is full steam ahead Ed. All the kids know that he would never hurt a fly, certainly not a spider or a cat or a tree or them.)

It's almost time for me to return her home, but she asks for one more thing. She thinks I wont say yes, so she puts it out there for me -- can we go to Eugsters Farm?

Whatever for? We'd have like literally 25 minutes there!

For the goats, the kittens, the flowers...

I just manage to get her home at the appointed time. 

How did the day go by so quickly? I need to grocery shop -- the kids have cleaned out the fruits, we have no salad fixings -- things are pretty dire! And yet, I dont immediately head to the store. I come back to the same coffee shop (Barriques) and get a full milky cup, and I finish the scone I started in on this morning and I take out my laptop and it feels soooo good!

The goal is to write, but I lose myself for a good many minutes in reading an essay from the New Yorker. It's about Monet and if you know Ocean even modestly well, you'll know that I am drawn to a Monet canvas like any young person is drawn to her smart phone. The article is a review of the soon to come out book on him -- Monet, the Restless Vision. It's one of those reviews that is a total treasure, because it explains myself to me! It brings me closer to understanding why I love Monet's paintings so damn much. I should read the book it reviews. I will read the book it reviews, but this afternoon, I am just lost in this piece of exceptional New Yorker writing and if you yourself have wondered why looking at a Monet isn't at all like looking at any other canvas in a museum, you, too, should read it. Perhaps this link will lead you to it.

Groceries, home, supper, Ed. One leads to the next, leads to the next, leads to the next, until the day just has to end because I am soooo spent. 

with love...

Sunday

Still warm. Still sunny. Still dry.

 

Still not sleeping well, or rather -- waking up too early, then settling into thoughts rather than another round of sleep.

And so you get one more day of more serious posting as a result. But just one more.

I had gone through a folder of letters from my mom yesterday. I hadn't exactly kept those letters in the years she'd written them (these were from just prior to my divorce), but she made copies of them all, maybe anticipating that I would have tossed the originals, and she handed these copies to me, along with my brief and indifferent responses a few years ago. She wasn't cleaning out her stuff. So was this for emphasis? In case I missed her insults the first time around?

As you know, recently I had wondered whether I should have pushed back against her wild darts directed at me, though watching the recent American political scene, I'm pretty sure I was right to just stay silent. You cannot tell people who believe their stories that what they hold as gospel truth is one big fabrication. You cannot fact check for them, you cannot bring witnesses, evidence. It doesn't work and just raises the temperature in the room.

Ed and I have breakfast. Tentatively I bring up the subject again. Of her. Ed is quiet this morning. Maybe he's had enough. I ask him -- what would you have done if your mom had got it into her head that you were a terrible person and insisted on telling you this?  Hung up on her.  

I see that this was the wrong question. My mother didn't say this, she wrote it. And I did trash it, which is the equivalent of hanging up, but then, as if on repeat dial, she put it all in that folder and sent it to me again. I kept it this time. Why, you ask? To remind myself that this is who I'm dealing with -- a person who makes up stories about those who do not give her what she thinks ought to be hers.

My mom never retracted any of the stuff she wrote about me (pages and pages of it!). I'm quite sure she never wavered in her belief that I was totally crazy to want to end my marriage. It drove her nuts that I did not want to talk to her about it and so she walked out, then dug in her heals. Talk about the elephant in the room! But, as her needs increased and her calls to me for help multiplied each day, I became the "angel child" and we became her "beloved family," "the most important thing in life," -- this is the idea she wanted to leave behind. And with this directive to me:   you have to stay well! We all need you!  Lucky break for her, I outlived her.

In between breakfast and bagging tomatoes for the freezer -- both with Ed by my side -- I read the essays of David Sedaris once again. Now that my mother is gone, I can smile overtime at his brand of humor,  with double compassion for his swirl of emotion as he navigated the last days of his father's life.

A week has passed since I had my last half sensible conversation with my mom. Six days since her death. Papers sorted, phone calls made, emails written, clothing donated to Goodwill. All that remains is a family memorial meeting which the kids want and I'm willing to facilitate. I suppose to the great grandkids, it would be strange not to have some form of remembrance. When their cat died, the young family held a funeral for him. Weird not to do something for someone who, after all, gave life to us all. In a few weeks we'll gather. Words will be spoken, ashes will be scattered. (Unlike in Poland, it's not illegal to do this in America on public lands.) I have a small gift for each daughter, we'll eat a meal together and I'm hoping I'll return to sleeping well thereafter. No more elephants in the room. 

And no more reflection on this! I've filled in the backstory, I've explained the difficulties. Time to really hang up the phone finally and return to the tranquility and warmth of my farmette days.

 

This afternoon, Ed and I go for a brief walk.  It's amazingly lovely out by the turtle pond in our county park. The colors are muted of course, the grasses are drying up quickly, the water level in the pond is terribly low, and yet...

 

Ed reminds me that there is no better place to be right now and I do agree. On this day, at this time, in this place. But I know I'll be itching to travel again soon. The author Habib suggests in her book on "...an irreverent history of travel" that we should go places with wonder, not with opinion, expectation, not to view with our biased eyes, to pat ourselves at our superior ways of avoiding the appearance of tourism, not to test ourselves, or to measure their way against our way, but simply to experience wonder. 

I love that image, even though I agree with Ed that wonder comes at you with equal strength even if you just stay home. Our walk in the county park this afternoon is filled with moments of wonder! Look around you! In Flushing Meadows Park (see yesterday's post), in Farm Lake Park (where we walk today) there are people filling the place with their joyous presence. Amidst fields of prairie flowers and sprawling canopies of oaks. Out on the waters of the lake...

Travel has to deliver more to make it worth my while, my resources, my getting on that plane that I know does our planet no favors. And travel does deliver more: it opens up closed spaces within you. And it brings you down to size. There is so much more to life than just your petty grumbles and self indulgent whimpers and cravings. So much more... Entering that other world keeps you humble. And happy to be alive. And very happy to come back to the turtle pond, the prairie grasses, and of course all the beloved people here.

Speaking of beloved people here, guess who comes over for dinner on the porch! 

And it is the perfect evening for it.

(play first, eat later!)

September really does have the best weather for being out there, around a table as the dusk sets in. Fills you with wonder indeed!

 

 

 

and love...

Saturday

In working through a backlog of my mom bills, accounts and payments, I notice that in recent days her FICA score (in other words her credit worthiness) has shot up to way over 800. In other words -- exceptional! In death, she is finally a terrific credit risk. She would be proud.

This is my day then -- not an emotional catch up, but a realistic one, where I do the math, tick off lists, leaf through papers. 

I'm a broken record here, but it really is another beautiful day! 

Morning walk...

And then I go straight to the downtown market... 

 

 

 

... where I pick up flowers (they are having a great run this late summer -- for those growers who have the ability to irrigate their fields. It's been beastly dry!), arugula, and more corn (several farmers have late season corn). 

And bakery treats from Madison Sourdough.

 

 

On the way home, I listen to a story about immigrants on NPRadio. Read it here, why don't you -- it's even better online, because there are photos appended to it. And it is beautiful. 

My family on my mother's side is one big immigrant mess (Like A swallow describes it well, I think), even as my mother liked to talk about it as a straight line ascent: she very much saw herself as part of another, older generation of immigrants, glorified now in the retelling, as if they paused no threats to the "American fabric" and worked their way up without the opposition of other low income groups. I always thought my own immigrant story was so weirdly out of step with what you read about in the press (about Poles coming to America) that I sometimes hesitate to even call myself an immigrant, because, well, I came here to finish my studies and then stayed and married and applied for citizenship, and got my green card and then lo, it turned out that I need not continue with my paperwork because as it happened, I already was an American (due to my mom's ancient citizenship status)! Who knew... I certainly didn't.

Still, I've always had an eye out for that word -- immigrant. And immigrant communities. I track their stories attentively and listen to the current immigration debates with a mix of horror and sympathy. And I ask Ed at breakfast today -- when did things become this bad? Why have we lost stories such as the one on NPR (read it, above!) and focused on some mythical dog eating whatever?

He gives me one of those sympathetic gazes, the one that means -- you are so not from here, you don't know anything, you poor dear, about who we really are... And he launches into his recount of American history. One he's told me many times before. About the fighting between the newcomers and the ones already here. About internment camps and McCarthy trials. About southern Italians and the Irish in New York. About the Mexicans and El Salvadorians now. It's always been like this! It's how we work out the tensions between people of different backgrounds.

Oh, you mean we throw the new arrivals into a den of angry wolves and see who survives? Says you from your white privileged position?

He reminds me that his family -- Jews from Europe, lower east side of Manhattan -- weren't exactly the white and privileged of New York. Still, he for one doesn't see any significant change in this country -- for the better or for worse. People fighting among themselves over whose culture defines this moment. We're always fighting here, pointing fingers at others -- he says, and this time with a note of exasperated resignation.

Nonetheless, the morning story stays with me, because guess what, I am still in the throes of processing my mother's death. The last time I had any semblance of a sensible conversation with her was Sunday -- less than a week ago. And I know that my mother in her own articulation of where she fit in here, saw herself very much as a young immigrant from Poland, who went back to Poland as an adult in part because she fell in love with this Polish guy (my father), but also because she was afraid of being persecuted here for her political beliefs at the time (which were then, like her father's and her future husband's, some version of Bernie Sanders type democratic-socialist).

I think about immigrants like me -- those who didn't speak the language when they came here, those who are questioned by kids in school about their awful home countries (is it true that in Poland...) and I think about Ed's words now as he tells me -- those communities that have made room for new immigrants? They will be the places of the greatest amount of growth in America. Just wait and see ten years from now.

We go back to look at the pictures in the NPR piece -- Flushing Meadows Park. Both he and I were there in 1964, at the time of the World's Fair. And at the end of the day he would go back to his home on 68th and I to mine on 46th. Mine is a life of coincidences and lucky breaks. (My mother's too, only she didn't see it that way.)

We go for a bike ride, pausing as we always do, along Lake Waubesa, where an immigrant family speaking no English, spreads out a picnic. Sharing a weekend afternoon with close ones, feeling safe, I hope...

And here's a novel way to end a September Saturday: after the ride, I go to Kopke's Greenhouses. I'd seen their truck at the market and I've been thinking for a while now that my winter plantings (for the windowsill) ought to include succulents. Kopke's had tiny ones that I thought would be far more perfect than what I usually strive to overwinter from the usual annual collection of spindly flowers.

Of course, no one shops at a greenhouse at 4 pm on a September Saturday. Their cash-cow now is the mum plant -- people love them, I don't. They remind me of the perfect green lawn: they seem somehow fake. And when they wilt or lose their blooms, it's one big throwaway. At the greenhouse, I see few people but lots of mums. What else... Oh! A few left over pansies. These little guys began my own growing season back in spring. They can fill a pot left bare after the spring ones finished their thing. So I add those to the cart. And of course the small pots of succulents. 

And as I walk the deserted aisles, I think how quickly everything changed since my visit here in late April when I filled my car twith a plethora of annuals for the tubs. The store was crowded and people were so excited, so happy about all that would happen as spring exploded on us. April. The season was changing fast. Oh yeah. That was when my mom changed as well -- from unhappy but maybe somewhat happy, and definitely independent (sort of kind of), to... well, this: her rapid decline in September. Loss of vision one day, loss of life the next. 

But, even though I am only five days past her death, the shock elements have receded (and why was I shocked anyway -- everyone expected her to die, me most of all!) and I am thinking increasingly about the months ahead, stripped of responsibility now for her care, which, honestly, is a big exhale. Because, you know, she was a handful. Connected to me more than to anyone else in her final decade. Good thing she decided to like me again (most of the time). "Beloved angel of a child" is a good spot to inhabit when you have to track, fix, make good, every step and mistep your mom makes in the last years of her life. Much better than "cruel despicable human being" -- words she'd used on me just a few years before I moved her here so that I could look after her. What can I say, I learned to live with her drama. But it was never, ever easy.

Here are my succulents:

Pretty, no?

with love...

end of the week

This was the week that was! (You're probably too young to remember a TV show from the early 1960s by a similar name...) Can we please return to normal now? Oh, but what exactly is the new normal? Let me mull that one for a bit...

The Hospice team calls me in the morning. Oh-oh, did I forget something? Do they want me to come back and pick up a missed item that I should have known to take with me? Missed a paper to sign (even as I signed so many!)?  I've never walked that path from Hospice to death before. But, they merely say to me -- we're here for you. Are you alright? How good they are to have no expectations! Just concern. (And to have a staff person charged with looking after the ones left behind. I'm not in need of help. No, not at all. Maybe a sleeping pill next time I try to get a good night's rest, but that's it. But I surely know that a family death can leave behind shattered lives. Hospice is there for them. How good is that!)

I get up, I walk through the drying garden, feed the animals..

Eat breakfast with Ed. We have this argument going: how do you best eat a frozen croissant. I say you have to reheat it in the oven for twelve minutes. He says in the microwave for 50 seconds. I am so tired of making decisions this morning that I tell him -- oh, go ahead and wave it! And it is just fine. Different, but fine.

I suppose this is the way I would describe my day today -- different, but fine.

I talk to my sister then. Poor thing -- it's her mother too and she has to process it all at a distance. In a way, that's harder. You're left not with things to do, affairs to put in order, but with your own thoughts and memories. Our mother, strong personality that she was, had an impact, even on those who lived far from her. An indirect influence is still an influence. My mom was an enduring subject of our conversations, even in our senior years. You have to shuffle things around a bit now. She is no longer here. All that was her is in the past. You are free, unburdened, but also alone. You're not reacting, you are forging ahead without the barricades, if not necessarily the guardrails of her oversight. But wide open paths can feel uncomfortably strange, too.

So we talk about all that, about these last months. I walk her through the events once again and eventually that's done, and I hang up, and I have an hour, (or is it two?) to stand there with a hose to water the tubs. That's how you move to regular old life: you notice on your morning walk that some annual plants are drooping, you go out and stand with a hose over each one and that takes up the rest of your morning.

And still,  it's all so fresh. I think about how strange it is to be suddenly without the daily emails, the clockwork phone calls, nearly every one ending with me saying -- I'm sorry you had such a rotten day. I used to think -- I sound like that kid book, "Alexander and the Terrible Rotten Horrible No Good Very Bad Day," on repeat! A steady stream of mostly unsolvable issues that my mother generated as regularly as a machine throwing out tennis balls at you. Her life's burdens haunted me since before Covid. Five years of intense mothering of my mother. Done now. So weird... 

But I also accept now what I could not accept before -- that perhaps all these years, she was okay. Ed always claimed she thrived on discontent. She got places that way. So maybe she was okay all these last years, with her illicit candy bars, her solo meals in the dining room (she did not want to listen to "other people's problems"), her puzzle doing in the lounge, even as nasty others messed things up there. She was a city girl (Detroit, D.C., New York, Warsaw, New York again) and plant life in the village where we, her kids lived, and then summered with her parents, did not interest her much, but in her assisted living room, she would look out the window and admired the tubs of flowers planted in the courtyard. She developed a theoretical love of nature then. I say theoretical, because really, it was all out the window. (Besides, she disliked Wisconsin. Both my parents did. My dad on his last visit here in maybe 1983 or 1985 -- he died in 2013 -- took a walk with me in the suburbs where I lived and asked -- you really want to spend the rest of your life in this town?)  My mom, city girl, telling me now in her late nineties -- it's good that you touch the dirt and bring yourself closer to the earth out there on the farmette. (But not so good that she ever wanted to visit me at the farmhouse. Freshly moved from California, she resisted getting too close to my life with Ed. She lived fifteen minutes away and still she came here just once. To show a friend where I lived.)

 

I put the hose down. It's time for the kids.

The two older ones had "picture day" today in school. I smile at how important this is, even now, in the days of so many cameras, phones, taking videos and pics daily! Both chose their outfits with care, Sparrow upset yesterday because he couldn't find a bracelet he wanted for picture day (Sparrow, the camera wont catch your wrist! I dont care! It's for good luck!), Snowdrop, frustrated with the directive to please comb your hair with more care today. I get them of course in the hours after, when the hair is once again tussled and bracelets are misplaced, but still, this was the day and this is how they looked, in September of 2024, he in 1st grade, she in 4th, on picture day!

(with the water bottle carrier he sewed yesterday in sewing class)

Snowdrop has her violin lesson later this afternoon, so we adjust our schedules for that and I drop them off at the new Friday drop off point and now I have just the quiet of farmette life, on a beautiful evening of mid September. 

Ed is out examining an old truck somewhere. I go for a walk. If I learned anything at all in the last months it is that sitting on your butt is a surefire way to melancholy and physical decline. My mother's sudden rapid downturn is absolutely linked to her stubborn refusal to move out of her recliner once I transferred her to the nursing care facility. However content she was in her discontent before, it all collapsed for her once she refused to get up and out of her chair. So tonight, I resume my walks. A bike ride tomorrow? Sounds nice...

Prairie grasses, drying landscapes, sounds of birds. So beautiful, all of it....

with so much love...

 

next September day

And the great September weather continues. 

 

 

 

Even in this most unusual month for all of you and especially for all of us, in my family, the good weather just drifts right in, here in south-central Wisconsin, day after day, same sunshine, same comforting warmth. It's like we are standing still while spinning in a storm of events. There was a debate, and in the thick of words flying across a split screen, I got the call that my mother died. Yeah, her death was like a shudder underneath the earth's crust: it had an impact, on me, and, too, on all members of our family, even those who had little contact with her in the past decade or two or three. She had one of those outsized personalities that left you wondering what just happened when she touched your life. Her smile, but too, her scowl were legendary! I remember when she was hospitalized this April and the staff complained that she berated them and wouldn't cooperate. A new doc came in and he reported to me, grinning through his words -- she was great with me! Smiled and called me her guardian angel! Lovely woman! Next day he called again -- never mind. Didn't like my suggestions. Totally hostile. Told me she wouldn't treat her worst enemy the way I treat her. 

Her death means that all this is shut down now. Legends of the past. We move through the day, with memories which make us laugh, because so many of the more dramatic ones are a lot more fun in the retelling always. In my everyday, her exaggerations and dramatizations always left me depleted. Ed couldn't understand why I let them get to me so much. It's on you to shrug it off and move on -- he'd always say. And I did always move on, but it took a while. Because, shouldn't I be able to do better by my mother? To turn things around for her (and therefore for the both of us)?  Every once in a while there would be a glimmer of hope. She would say -- I read your blog post about your problems with flights cancelled and travel plans unraveling. I can't believe you were so upbeat about it! I should be so unbothered by everything and everyone! But the next day she would be back in the same tailspin of bother. All those perfectly straight white teeth of hers, ten times better than mine, ready to smile? Pffft! Retired now, saved exclusively for the very rare kid visit. (She discouraged them all from coming. I think just seeing their energy levels exhausted her. How do you manage at your age? -- she'd often ask me. Your grandmother was twenty years younger when she took care of you. I was ten years younger when I looked after your girls. You're old! In there was a compliment and a warning: I am dangerously close to being over the hill. Hold on to these days while they last! -- she'd say. Sigh...)

So on this splendid September morning, I feed the animals and I have a beautifully long breakfast on the warmed porch, no chasing of the sun needed...

 

And then I drive over to pick up my daughter and once again we head out in search of... my mom's body -- now presumably at the funeral home way at the edge of town.

They have put her "on display" for us. The funeral person hovers in the room while my daughter and I get closer. I'm thinking  -- can't you leave? I'm not about to steal anything! Still, the funeral person hovers. My daughter asks -- you want to be alone with grandma? No.... it would be me and the funeral person with your grandma.

Everyone says this -- they look so peaceful in death. Well sure. The empty body does not move, talk, smell, sing, cry, love. What gave life to all those feelings and emotions has left. Stardust and souls meandering in ways none of us understand. Or are they meandering? Maybe she, my mother, just left that body and found a home within those whom she loved. That's what I would do. Get rid of that wrecked ship that carried me along for a lifetime. Let me float now carefree in the hearts of those I adore.

I have one last good look at the face I knew so well, lifeless, but very much hers, standing in for the essence of the person that was my mother. How many of us get to know a face so well, to study another for 71 years of our lives? To have felt both so sad and so hopeful at its sight, to grow old, okay -- older! -- next to it?

So I look at it before it disappears for me, even as I know, like my grandma's face -- it will never really disappear for me. That face is stuck with permanent adhesive to my soul.

 

And now it's time to pick up Sparrow. His sister is home sick today so it's just him.

 

 

 

And because it's Thursday and a mid-September Thursday at that, we go to the local market... 

 

 

 

... so that I can pick up some local honey and, importantly, another box of tomatoes for freezing. I had already gotten one earlier this week and we have some ten freezer bags of tomatoes prepped and ready for our winter chilis, but ten bags are not nearly enough. We stock up on more.

Sparrow likes having his sister around, but he also likes the occasional day where he can take the lead at the farmhouse. We have a quiet afternoon of favorite Sparrow games and stories.

I drop him off, I return home. 

And let me just say a big thanks to all of you who wrote, who sent flowers and messages of love. Each one was savored and held close. You're all wonderful.

with so much love...