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....

Sunday

Even colder outside. They used to call it good sleeping weather. Well yeah, if you have a furnace. Ours has been on since Friday night.

(morning walk)

Breakfast. Ed is dozing on the couch, but rousing himself to join me for the morning meal. I say no -- just stay on the couch, we can talk across the room. 

And we do that but when I glance over at him I see he is cheating. His laptop is on his belly! Ed!

 

After breakfast, I go over to my mom's Hospice nursing care facility. 

She is totally discombobulated. Thrashing with regrets, angry words, and as the staff later described it -- remarkably, targeting herself rather than them, which had been her usual modus operendi. I can't get her to focus on the here and now, she can't see me, she refuses to listen.

I talk to the staff: she can't die like this -- I say to them. Dont you guys have some happy meds to make the transition to death easier, like a happy sail into eternity, full of flowers and rainbows or something? Isn't that what you do for people?

They assure me that she will not die like this, that they will adjust her meds and increase the ones that put a stop to these psychotic episodes. That all will be well by this afternoon.

In the meantime she dozes off, I stay.

She wakes up, I try again. She is calm now. Medicine kicked in? Maybe. But, her complete vision loss is a problem and she doesn't fully trust me to be who I say I am. So she tests me on knowledge of family history. It goes something like this:

You are Nina? (pause) Who were my brothers?

Johnny and Chester. She looks doubtful. Alright, Chester was your half brother. She still isn't convinced. She tells me I should have included Lillian. Not a brother, mom.

Huh. What's the name of the place outside Warsaw where you lived?

Gniazdowo. Yes, she nods, I got that right. And the other place in the forest next to it? 

Julin. 

You're smart. You must have done well in school. What was your favorite subject, math?

No mom. Writing. (That's only partly true. No need to explore my rebellious relationship with learning.) 

Yes, of course. Fiction or nonfiction?

Here's this woman who has almost no life left in her, who twenty minutes ago was calling herself a piece of trash, a failure, with no one but the Lord Jesus Christ (whom, in my entire 71 years of life, I have never heard her invoke) understanding her true pain, interviewing me about my life, having never done so before, and finding me just barely adequate at it. A few more questions later, she says -- well, you were good (at knowing family history), but not great. She tightens her lips, shakes her head. My mother, all in that one sentence, in that one facial expression.

 

Seeing all of her in this exchange, I now find it easier to sit and reassure, to hold her hand and prattle my way forward: Ed went sailing for two weeks. 

And who took care of the animals? 

I did. He's a nice guy, mom. 

Of course he's a nice guy. He's from New York. And who took care of the animals when you were away?  

She pauses. She resumes. What do you do with your time? 

Take care of grandkids. And you. 

Aren't you bored? No mom, not bored.  

Well, take care of yourself. Stay healthy. Workin' on it.

It doesn't really matter that she cannot fully embrace me, that I will always be that person who divorced a guy she happened to really like (she wrote a final good bye note that she has inserted into her Box of Important Papers -- I found it today, expressing love for her family and for my ex), that both daughters have wronged her terribly too many times to count -- it doesn't matter anymore. In the end, she could not ever get out of a trap of her own making -- of finding inadequacies and hardship everywhere. A trap that ultimately made her so unhappy with life and now in these last days as well.

Flawed that we were in her eyes, I do understand that she had pity. She had constant worry. She had her own way of feeling love. David Sedaris, on the death of his father wrote that it is possible to profoundly dislike a person and have love for them. There were years when my mom expressed on many written pages her profound dislike of me, of my life, my decisions. Her disappointment was so deep that she couldn't get herself to speak to me for years. But, I know that she couldn't help herself. This was who she was. And it did not take away from the fact that she surely loved the family that she refused to see or be with. Daughters whom she couldn't enjoy, grandchildren whose successes she so lauded and celebrated, at a distance. She made up her own rules and I admire her for that, even though now, in her last weeks of life, those same rules have caused her so much anger and psychic pain.

I leave her in a calm state. This person who has never felt the need to hug or kiss, has that need now, because without vision she cannot otherwise believe that this day still holds people in it who are her family.

*     *     *

In the evening the young family is here for dinner. Here comes Sparrow, with reddish hair, because his sister and her friend offered to paint it for him, and a crisp shirt that he put on especially for dinner at the farmhouse!

You can tell Ed is back -- Snowdrop immediately dives for his computer to play her favorite game on it.

Dinner on the porch. It's warm enough! Sort of.

We linger. Despite the early sunset, despite the need for an early bedtime, because it's a school night, we linger.

With love...

Saturday, of a kind

It is a singularly odd day with many good things going for it. First and foremost -- Ed is home and I have forgotten how grand it is to have him here again. (The forgetting, I suppose, was deliberate: you adjust to change by not thinking too much about the downsides of the new normal.) Then -- another welcome event -- his old pickup truck died and thus it has to go to the junk heap. That truck was held together with scotch tape, I swear. I feel better about it being off the road (absent a miraculous fix, but Ed thinks it is pretty much a gonner). And one more thing: it's cold as anything outside (we wake up to 45F/7C), but the sun is out, which makes it seem like a very warm winter morning! May be odd, but not unpleasant. 

I leave Ed to rest and head out to the farmers market, buying almost nothing. Just these:

It's an excuse really. To take in that crisp winter (haha) air! From there -- to the bakery.

And now we are finally ready for breakfast together. Not you Dance! I mean him and me!

There are many details of his sail across the Great Lakes and I ask about some of them. Basically things went very well except that they got stuck waiting for winds for several days toward the end. Logging in some quality guy time! 

I had suggested a bike ride for this afternoon, but things have been slipping with my mother and so instead, I went over to spend some time at her place, discussing too with the Hospice nurse our options going forward. I remember when I was way younger, when Hospice care first came onto the scene, I thought to myself -- I have to remember about them in the future!  Of course, it then became mainstream and what a relief it is to all of us who have parents in need of that kind of help at the end of their lives! My mother never really accepted her move to Hospice nursing care from her assisted living room. She thought she was being shortchanged in the care department. How wrong she was! The staff has been round the clock helpful. I could not have managed this without them.

Toward evening Ed did prod me out for a ride. It's jacket weather!

We did the loop, using the new bike trail addition to keep us off the busier road. Ed grumbled a little about how it took the hills (and thus the challenge) out of our ride and, too, the newly paved bike trail cut through our beloved prairie in a really unattractive way...

... but, the sun was still out and the breeze was light and so on balance, it was a fabulous ride.

(Pause by Lake Waubesa: no, the photo isn't crooked, the wharf is! Which is why I am not standing on it.)

And guess who didn't have to put away the chickens tonight! Odd to be suddenly free of that chore. Odd, but in the nicest way.

Friday

How cold is it? So cold... Well, not that cold. Tell me it's in the 50sF (so maybe 12C) in January and I'll do a victory dance around the farmhouse. But that same reading, my friends, is too cold for a leisurely breakfast out on the porch. So, after the walk to the barn...

... I take my foods, my flowers, my candle (last day of it!) to the kitchen table.

In the spring and summer I think about my flower fields. In the fall and winter, I think about how to spice up a short and cold day. I float many travel ideas, I consider starting new movement programs (remember last year's ballet? I mean, it did last for a few months before it sputtered to a spring-time halt, to be resurrected, maybe, this winter). I give a lot of attention on creating warmth, whether it be physical or mental. And so over breakfast, I imagined trips, I thought about beefing up my movement (never realizing, for instance, until the NYTimes blasted it all over its front page, that I could be allowing my rear end to develop dead butt syndrome, or gluteal amnesia if I spend too little time in the winter prompting it into action). These are pleasant thoughts (well, maybe not butt movement, which is one of those many things that we ought to attend to but seems so terribly dull as to be easily forgettable). Eventually though, I proceed with the day.

When it warms up just a tad, I bike over to Steffi's house to help keep the plantings there alive, given that we have had no rain in the past week and the forecast calls for no rain and plenty of sunshine for today and then next day and the next week and the one after. Normally, a dry September is like a gift of continued summer sunshine, but I've committed to keeping that place green and so there I am, standing with a hose for several hours, because I refuse to set up sprinkler systems for a lawn that I can't stand by definition. 

And that's how a Friday morning slipped right through my fingers. Kid pick up time came all too quickly, though not without joy. I can count on at least one of them being in a great mood at the end of the week, and quite often the both of them are bubbly and spirited.

And wet!

Guess what happened as I drove to their school? A sudden cloud cover took hold and there was rain! From 5% chance we leapt to 100% certainty. Not a lot of rain, but it would have been enough to save the grasses of Steffi's House. In other words -- I wasted several hours doing something that wasn't needed. Ah well. When I water, I meditate. That's never a waste!

This was to be the day when I promised we could pick at least one of the many melons ripening out back. True, it is raining (briefly, but exactly at the moment we drive up to the farmette). So what. I have umbrellas!

An at once funny and beautiful ending to the first week of back to school.

And here's another beautiful ending -- I get a call from Ed: they've sailed the boat to its proper destination and he is on his way home tonight. For once I'm not the one coming home from a trip. He is. Hi Ed...

with so much love...

a temporary cool-down

September is the month when your blood needs to adjust to cooler temps. That first shock of relatively cool air at night (low 40sF or 6C) will come tomorrow and stay with us through the weekend. And frankly, I'm feeling it a bit of it even now, as I chase the sun around the table again at breakfast time.

I'll get used to this and of course much much colder air currents, but the initial plunge always chills me the most. As I said, my blood hasn't adjusted its own internal thermostat.

The morning walk -- no snipping, no weeding, just animal care and a glance at the fading autumn flower fields.

Then I sat and hoped for rain. My wishes were not granted, which unfortunately dooms me to water Steffi's yard yet again, but I put that off for another day. I'm in a slow mode this morning. My big event was that a guy came back to talk about branch removal of trees that are working their way into the power lines at the side of the road. Madison Gas and Electric does the tree trimming on their tab but he wanted to discuss my options and since Ed was not there, I basically gave him free reign to not only cut down branches, but to take down two trees -- a black walnut and a Russian Olive  -- that have menaced other trees and my flower beds for too long. That's what happens when you go off sailing, leaving the home base in your hands of your sweetie who has long complained about the proliferation of trees on farmette lands!

And now it's time to pick up the kids.

I tell them -- no treats en route to home today! Once or twice a week is more than enough. They beg. I cave. French fries from Culvers it is. (Is it a surprise that the car smells of fries and ketchup?)

(the old pear tree has been raining pears all around my car...)

Evening. I cook fish. The cats are happy. I need the protein! 

I had in mind a quiet set of hours. Maybe a comedy to watch, a couple of pieces of chocolate to munch. Feet up.

And then I hear that telltale meow. If you have an outdoor cat sharing space with you, you'll have heard it too. It's an announcement. That they're bringing you a gift.

Dance has been crazy with her benevolence this past week. She has brought in a chipmunk. A mouse. And today -- a very large and very lively frog.

Do you know how high those amphibians can jump??

Dance always leaves her traumatized gifts squarely in the middle of the living room. Oftentimes they look dead, but it's all merely to fool everyone. You go near them and they suddenly revive and run like crazy. This frog leapt so high and moved so far that I was sure I would be chasing it for the rest of my waking hours today. But I got lucky. Eventually I found an Amazon box within reach and the frog got caught in Prime Time delivery wrapping. 

Now let's go back to the idea that it's a quiet evening, with maybe a comedy streaming and a few chocolates within reach...

and love...

September thoughts

I'm reading a book about travel. Not your usual kind -- this one, titled Airplane Mode: an Irreverent History of Travel, by Shahnaz Habib, really digs at the essence of our movements for pleasure. It's not an easy book to describe and I don't remember how I found it -- probably through a review somewhere -- but it is to me a more important piece of travel writing than, say, a guide book, or any of your typical travel essays, journals or suggestive readings. I'm not done with it yet, but I do want to mention it because here I am thinking about my future travels and I realize that my travel opportunities will likely diminish over the next years (less strength, fewer resources) and so I think very hard about what is it that I still want to get out of travel to distant lands. Habib helps me shape those questions.

For a long time now I've thought about how much I feel completely alienated from tourism. Funny how that is, given that many would describe me as an incessant tourist. But there is a difference between tourism -- following a prescribed path to "must see" sights (who decides on this list anyway?), whether with a group or with the assistance of a guide book -- and traveling, which to me, is just being somewhere far away from your own home. Sure, I've been a tourist in my life -- most recently when traveling with Snowdrop -- but at some level it always seems wrong for me (the exception -- walks taken with locals who showed some flexibility and individual preference in where we walked and what we talked about). And even traveling can get complicated: there is a difference, I think, between traveling to stand back and observe (so often this means gawking at other mortals doing quaint things, from our own cultural, typically white and privileged, perspective), and immersing yourself in some fashion in the life around you, taking it in with all your senses, giving in to a place that is not your home. Eating their food, learning their habits, tapping your foot to their music. Sure, the lines are sometimes fuzzy -- for example, when I take out my camera and photograph something that I find uniquely charming -- that comes awfully close to gawking, no? Still, as Habib's writings have reminded me again and again, it's important to maintain curiosity about the entirety and to put yourself into the history of a place, and by that I mean into the perspective of the people who have for years and years lived there, and to whom you are the outsider. A guest, perhaps reluctantly welcomed by the locals.

And as I plan out my next year of travel (because I am a person who has from her childhood loved roaming the planet out of an insatiable curiosity about what's "on the other side"), I think about how is it that I decide where to go. Maybe it would surprise you to know that I do it in this way: I stare at a map and I ask myself -- where is it that I feel good about being on this next trip? What feels right? What place is worth the long flight, the resources spent, the time away from family, from Ed? And I imagine myself in one place -- no, that doesn't feel right for now. And another -- no, not that either. And eventually, perhaps in a few days, after a few tries and a lot of browsing, something strikes me as exactly right for that trip: yes, I can see myself waking up there, walking, eating, taking it in.

Most of my travel -- from the time I came from Poland to New York to work as an au pair and onwards -- has been solo. As a woman traveler, usually without great backup funds to pay for mistakes made, I've had to be cautious. This is something that big guy Ed has never quite understood. And when I was younger, I refused to acknowledge this inherent frailty as well. I remember landing at an airport in Sicily where I dragged my sister on a wild trip around southern Europe (we were both just around 20 years old). We had a room booked at a bed and breakfast far away from the airport. How did I imagine we'd get there? These things didn't worry me. I asked around at the airport and was happy when a clerk at one of the counters offered to drive us to our destination (maybe two hours away by car) after he finished work. However did I think this was a good idea? And when he first drove us elsewhere, because he was also giving his buddy a lift after work, and they asked us up to the apartment for a cup of tea before we set out again, it never struck me that following these two strange men was perhaps unwise. (Ed, by contrast, often hitchhiked alone, took up strangers on their invitations, and never gave any of it a second thought, with good reason -- he had little to fear. I suppose he does look Jewish, but it's not as if he wears a yarmulke or claims this as an identity. Compare his weakly suggestive appearance to being female and alone -- and even that is one step up from being a black or brown female and alone in a strange and desolate place!)

Without doubt, I have always felt safer walking and hiking alone in Europe than in the U.S. Maybe it comes from watching too many violent movies here, but honestly, I don't think so. Ed will tell me that statistically speaking my being robbed, mugged, attacked, raped on a solo trek are small here or there. But to me there's no joy in hiking through a deep forest, or late at night on empty streets and getting hit with panic when a rustle of the leaves or a click of a boot on the pavement reveals suddenly the presence of a stranger. Male. Coming toward me. Somehow on my hikes in France or Scotland or late at night in any of the cities across the ocean has never generated the same feeling of primal fear.  As an adolescent walking the streets of Warsaw late at night, I used to joke that I had no problem outrunning a drunk. There, unlike here, being afraid of random violence, of guns on the streets, guns in schools (guns in schools!!), guns, period, is unimaginable.

I read and I think about this on one more day of stellar weather. The walk to the barn is lovely...

The air is a bit cool early on, so I take my breakfast outside, but I chase the sun around the table to stay warm...

And I talk to Ed and we mumble a bit about going on a biking trip, maybe next fall, maybe in Wisconsin, and then I notice the time and it is one of those days when the morning belongs to obligations and the afternoon to the kids. I take my car for a routine maintenance at the dealer and this leaves me with just enough time for a short walk, to the park, where I am bathed in an ocean of gold. That's September in south-central Wisconsin for you!

 

 

... and before long it's time to pick up the kids. It's ice cream day today!

The bubble that usually envelops the whole first week of school has not yet burst. They're full of good stories of friends, always the friends, of books, of specials (gym, art, library, STEAM), and somewhere in all that there is, I am sure, lots of learning taking places. A broad scale learning that includes getting on with many different people in many different ways.

 

 

In the evening I return to my music, my cold soup, my book. I had skimmed some of it, but chapter 3 was un-skippable. It was perfect. A description of the author's father who hates travel. This essay, about someone who despises leaving his home in India, is possibly the best travel essay I have ever read. I'll end with giving you just one paragraph from that chapter. I'll let you make of it whatever you want, whatever it means to you:

The religion of tourism, its holy books and its rituals, is deep within me even when I strike out on supposedly non-touristy paths. I am like the Jewish atheist in the famous joke who recoiled in horror after his son went to Catholic school and reported back about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit: "Son," he responded, "there's only one God and He doesn't exist!" My aversion to tourism is a kind of faith in its power. Nothing in the world is a must-see, I told myself, while slowly roasting under the Roman sun in a two-hour line to step inside the Colosseum. Nothing at all, except here I am.

With a smile...

First Day of School

All five grandkids start the new school year today. That's a big wow for me! One starts fourth grade, two start first grade, and the youngest two return to their preschools, though each will be on the young side of their classroom composition. So, big steps forward for all!

For me as well. Ed is still waiting for a favorable wind to bring him into his final sailing port, so I wake up to an empty house. It's cold and it's dark when I get out of bed. Yes, the sun does crack the horizon by the time I go to the barn to release and feed the chickens...

... but the feel of autumn is unmistakable. 

(a mist covers the prairie just beyond the farmette lands)

I need to be at my older girl's house a few minutes after seven and I dont want to get stuck in traffic, so I am on the road way before that. Tradition has it that I take the First Day photo of her three kids. It's silly, of course. She's a good photographer. But I love these routines that give a good push to a new beginning. (Witness: big deal about breakfast, every single day.) I very much love always being there at the start of the new school year.  (And if I could be in two places at once, I'd be in Chicago too. With permission, I'm posting as well the "first school day" pic of the Chicago girls.)

(Snowdrop)

(Sparrow)

(Sandpiper)

(Juniper and Primrose)

And it is joy. Sure, one child is a tad nervous about the reentry into the social quagmire that is the classroom, and another is tearful when left by parents in a totally new setting, but this is all insignificant. All five kids are happy campers. Or rather schoolers.

Which, of course, puts us old people in great moods as the new school year begins.

I drop off the older kids, I do grocery shopping, I drive over to the bakery. All this before my first cup of coffee!

(always fun to see what designs appear on the breads)

 

My breakfast (finally!) is with music and my computer. So yes, a long one. On the porch, but I'm bundled in a sweatshirt. The cool air stays with us all the morning hours.

 

 

I could get ambitious, but something of that labor-free weekend stays with me and so I go slowly with my tasks for the day. I clean up cat messes, I weed a little, I scrub a bathroom, I attend to my unhappy mother. And finally, I settle in with my second cup of coffee and a book. To get that feeling of peace that I always want to have with me as I set out to pick up the two older kids at the end of their school day.

We come to the farmette of course. Familiar and sweet.

 

I'm not surprised to hear that all five kids had great first school days. It's like a spring garden -- there so much hope, so much enthusiasm for the project ahead, that it's easy to get sucked into all that positivity. Old friends stay loyal, new friends are responsive, teachers are smiling, the work load is small.

Such a good first day... For all the kids out there who went off to school for the first time today: may your enthusiasm never waver, and your friendships grow strong.

Happy year ahead!