Chosen

We have a new cat, inasmuch as anyone has a cat.  More accurately, the cat has us.  I know that is a real yawner to you Experienced Cat People, but we were Cat Virgins, until recently. The first cat, Kat, was a scrap of a cat when he appeared on our back deck: starving, matted, all but three dangling teeth broken off under the gums, diagnosis courtesy of the Expensive Feline Dental Surgeon Specialist, called in to crack the case.

So toothless Kat, by all accounts part Maine Coon, now has a playmate: a smaller, younger now spayed and vaccinated sister.  We didn’t know cats came smaller, since Kat was a starter cat for us, dog people, and once he started eating, soft food of course, that bag of skin turned out to be quite substantial. 

At first, there was little to learn.  He was too sick to teach us.  But as he began to feel better, orientation began.  We learned where to pet him (back of the neck), where not to (belly - claws too available when irritated.)  We learned that he would come to our laps when he wanted and that we needed to have a towel available to quickly drape over our legs if we had on thin pants (claws again - kneading this time.) 

Obviously, Kat can’t hunt birds, which has been perfect, as we have multiple bird feeders.  Relaxation is over, however, as the feeders turned into smorgasbords for new cat, black and white, slinking out from under one of our outbuildings. In a few horrifying seconds, new cat can jump six feet from a standing position, snatch a bird from the feeder and have feathers flying.  We saw this, horrified, several times.  We decided to try to substitute Friskies for songbirds, and gradually it began to work.  I’ve never been quite so grateful for opposable thumbs.  Being able to open a can is my contribution to the continued future of the Audubon Society. 

Feeding her led to naming her.  She bounced around for awhile as Feral Fredericka.  But then inevitably, she became Oreo.  As she began to wait for us, we discovered she is a circler. When you open the back door and begin to go out with breakfast, you have to watch every step.  There is something eminently attractive about one’s ankles (not sure. . .). So as you walk, a small, quite bendable cat weaves in and out, making each step a badge of courage.  Without coffee, maneuvering from kitchen door to gazebo (Oreo’s subdivision) can be quite the beginning to one’s day, fraught with peril. 

Once you get there, Oreo continues to want to get petted, so stroke it is, down the back, then down the back, then the belly, and down the back.  Once she realizes the food dish is on the ground, well, affection be damned, and you are dismissed,  free to return to the house and resume your search for caffeinated beverage.

We also have two dogs, two Labradors, who have a giant, multi-sheltered kennel.  These two are repeatedly excited out of their skins to have you show up: Food!  Food! Food!  Walk! Walk! Walk! You! You! You! If one only had dogs, which was us until cats started showing up, one might consider oneself far more important than one really is.  I am beginning to think that the cats have been put on Earth as a spiritual lesson of sorts, to show us our real place in this universe.

Perhaps the evolutionary leap of opposable thumbs was purely to be able to open cat food cans.  Perhaps our upright bipedal posture is purely to give cats a moving figure eight within which to circle.  Perhaps clothing is meant for nothing more than to be the proud bearer of cat fur, even if you are on the way to work, to the gym, or to lunch with a friend; it doesn’t matter, go out there with pride.  You have been chosen, (you!) by the cat.

June

It's that time of year, when breath takes in cool morning air, when my body stretches toward the sun, opening like a day lily, unfolding from the night. The Earth seems to love June, at least this year.  The rains have come when needed; the errant blast of May's summer heat has faded from memory.  The tomato vines are winding their up their poles, I harvested the rest of the garlic yesterday, planted last October.

Think of that.  One can put a tiny garlic clove into the ground in October, the same clove you might smash with your knife on the cutting board in the kitchen.  You might immediately notice that distinct aroma or it might be when it is sizzling in olive oil in the pan, or maybe if you are watching the  news, you might not notice at all.  You might notice what a difference it makes in your pasta sauce, or if you are watching the news as you eat dinner, maybe not.  (Experience speaks.)

But if you put that clove into the ground, you would not be able to ignore the magnificent forked plant that waits for you nine months later.  And when you pull on its tall green stalk, with the bottom leaves now browned (the sign that it is time), you will pull out of the ground a full head of those cloves, that clove and all its sisters.

I haven't always gardened.  I was not wise enough to understand my mother's need to put her hands in the soil.  She grew up in the country.  Everyone had a kitchen garden.  Her mother grew herbs to help the new mothers in the neighborhood heal from having their babies.  That was her mother's job.  My father grew up on a big dairy farm.  There was a kitchen garden behind the big barn.  Having a garden was both ordinary, and a sign that you were from the country, and that maybe you couldn't afford to buy your vegetables or your milk in the store, like more successful people did.  If you sat at a desk, a gleaming, shiny, orderly desk, there was no soil to clean out from under your fingernails.

I have sat behind those desks.  I have had business cards, with my name and "contact information" on them.  Those cards have had the names of several institutions on them.  I was a piece of those institutions, and each time was enriched by the prospect.  There was respect that came with that card, and "opportunity for growth", and each time I think I contributed.  I hope so anyway.  Those institutions were each well-meaning, organized to help humans and others along, and I think I did my small part.  I made mistakes, of course, and can give you a list if you contact me around 3 in the morning, as that is when the list is loudest.

But now, after almost seven decades on this planet, one of my proudest moments is when I put my trowel in the ground and bring up dark rich soil, wiggly with worms.  When we began to create gardens at Briarpatch more than twenty years ago, the soil was dirt.  The soil was hard red clay with rocks.  It has been with gradual effort, gradual feeding and loving, reading and experimenting that this dirt has become soil.  Vegetable scraps, tea leaves, coffee grounds into buckets in the kitchen and then out to the compost pile; trips to the farms of friends to pick up the manure from their carefully fed animals.  Gradually gradually, all that became that which would feed the dirt, change its composition, allow it to invite the earthworms, and the microscopic creatures that help engineer life.

It doesn't happen overnight.  Well it does actually.  It happens at night, and during the day.  It is night after night and day after day, all silently, all without notice.  Gradually, gradually, the dirt becomes soil; becomes that which can nourish new life.  Like us, I suppose.  Gradually gradually, we realize that business cards can compost too, if need be, like our own bodies, all of it, all of us, cycling through as we will. 

The Unexpected

So yesterday afternoon I’m sitting on the window seat writing, channeling how my protagonist Allison would talk with Rebecca in their first real heart-to-heart, when I hear a giant metallic clang in the kitchen.  What in the world?  Long ago we had a foster beagle who would whack her metal food dish with her paw when she decided it was time to eat.  That’s what this sounded like, although my current two Labradors haven’t engaged in this arresting behavior.  To date.  

I went to check.  There was something swimming in their big metal water dish.  Swimming! Having fallen from above?  At first I thought it was a frog, it had the same web like motions with its legs, but then I realized no, it was a baby squirrel.  It was clearly struggling to breathe so I quickly took the bowl to the front porch and dumped it to get it out of the water.  When I could see it more clearly, I realized it was unlikely to bite me.  It hadn’t reached that stage of its life.  It didn’t yet know enemies.  This tiny creature, maybe three inches long, its delicate pink gray skin loose on its body, its puffy heavy-lidded eyes still closed, only knew suckling, only knew warmth.  At least until a few unfortunate moments ago.

How in a kitchen a barely born squirrel falls from the sky into the dog’s water dish is completely implausible unless you have been in my kitchen.  Our house is a rather Rube Goldberg construction, with the initial log cabin, the core of the house, put together by German settlers in the 1700’s.  Added onto ever since by generations of inventive homeowners, the roof lines are a creative mess that has resulted in a lovely warren of perfect places to raise baby squirrels.  Ergo. . .

I did what any foster mother would do under the circumstances:  picked up this creature and cradled in a towel, then found a box for it to live in until the next impossible steps emerged.  It’s tiny body was breathing heavily, its little abdomen pumping. As it instinctively curled up, except for its tiny claws and tail, it looked startlingly like a sonogram image of a human fetus.

One of its arms (?) paws (?) seemed at an odd angle, and it had a scrape on its hip (?) but other than that it seemed to be fine, nuzzling into the soft towel.  I ran to the barn looking for the tall ladder so I could climb up and see where it might have come from.  That wall is exposed logs from the original cabin, so it was clear that somewhere up there squirrels were being produced.  

Well, it wasn’t clear.  There were no other babies, no clear place for a nest.  Meanwhile, I called the vet, and when she told me that her wildlife people said to put the baby in a nest of grass “under the tree” from which it fell and the Mama would come get it, well, I decided not to explain the current circumstances. 

I called my husband and he said he would come home and we would figure this out together.  Meanwhile, I couldn’t help checking on it every few minutes, this tiny, tiny creature, breathing, just breathing.  Every once in a while, it would search with its nose and try to suckle.  Its breathing seemed to be slowing.

By the time John got home, I began to realize the inevitable.  John got on the ladder and he searched too.  No nest, no mother, no other babies.  

When John came back from burying this creature, just arrived, so quickly departed, he said the afternoon storm had left a rainbow.  

Our evening was quieter than usual.  I am still not over the turtle that didn’t make it.  Last week, coming home from fetching milk at a nearby farm, I passed a turtle to my left proudly crossing the last third of its trek across the road.  Head up, legs marching, destination within reach.  I pulled to the right, off the road, as there was a big curve just ahead of me, and I knew no one coming from the other direction would see that turtle, or be able to slow down.  Just then I saw it, a turtle’s worst nightmare:  a big Lowe’s delivery truck.  I waved my arms wildly to get it to slow down, but to no avail.  I could barely look back, but when I did, well. . .you know.  

There was a writing spider in the greenhouse yesterday busy stitching together the rubber plant, the columbine and the pineapple lily with its intricate web.  I was careful watering, so as not to do any more damage than I could help.  It scooted up to the top of the web, out of my way, and I talked to it the whole time. Then I took the beehive frames to the barn, the ones we cleaned out when our bees didn’t make it this year.  

Is there an end to this?  No, I guess not.  

At Artist’s Group on Sunday, a friend told us of two friends of hers, each with cancer. As she talked  about the treatments, with tears in her voice, another of our members nodded knowingly, I assume, recalling her own radiation. I skipped the gym yesterday because of some mysterious stubborn pains in my right foot and leg. I have at least two other friends who share Fred Sanford tendencies with me.  At least once per month, OK, week, it is clear that “this is the big one.”

There was a white feral cat in the driveway, the one that eats the field mice, oh, and the birds I feed so carefully.  And we have wild rabbits that come in the early morning and at dusk to eat the sprouts under those same bird feeders.  These are the rabbits that have, so far, evaded Mr. Hawk.

My 91-year-old mother is happy now, happier than she has been for a long time.  My first cousin brings her little jars of moonshine and apple juice with a cinnamon stick. When she is able to use her walker instead of the wheelchair, the owner of the sports bar where I take her for lunch rewards her with a shot of tequila.  

Why not?  I think, why not?  Life is. . .well, you know.  

From the sidelines

The day dawns so innocently.  The old-fashioned bearded irises continue to bloom; the walnut trees to leaf out, the spinach to bolt.  It all goes on, as if the weather hadn’t royally misbehaved for three days now.  We’ve had not just thunderstorms but strong thunderstorms, with hail and tornadoes threatening and pure indiscriminate destruction across a wide swath of the South. It kept a friend awake all night in Durham, North Carolina , on the lookout.  Entire communities in Alabama and Mississippi were upended.  Here, other than some fast, fierce thunder and lightening, the predictions were the worst part.  And yet this morning, with a slight breeze carrying the scent of newly opened tulip poplars, the morning sun just breaking the treetops, this day has amnesia, no memory, no regrets, no humility.  It just reappears, freshfaced at breakfast, as though we hadn’t been to the police station in the middle of the night.

We have to move on, astonished and grateful.  By the end of the day, we will forget our determination to buy extra batteries, check the generator, dusty and unused in the barn.  Once again, in a long tradition of once agains, what is known as disaster preparedness will start falling down the list.  

Yet anyone with their eyes open knows that climate change, whatever its multiple causes, is real, that these disruptions have just begun, that their intensity will increase.  It has to, because we are not learning. Just as those batteries go unbought, so it is our nature to ignore any disaster that does not call our name.  The drought in California, the rising seas throughout the world, the melting ice at the Poles, all somewhere else for right now.  Yes, my dear friend got no sleep last night, two hours away, but I slept just fine. My irises are still standing on their long vulnerable stalks.

And this blindness, this tendency to cognitive laziness, is not because I haven’t been through it.  When Hurricane Irene came through Raleigh, my neighbor’s roof was blown off.  Giant oaks came down in our yard.  Another neighbor fell from the horizontal trunk of one of them, chainsaw in hand, fell down right next to the cooler.  No power for days. Floods in nearby towns.  Everything stopped.  Everything was altered.  So I cannot claim ignorance. And explain this:  I was in Girl Scouts all the way to Camp Counselor, when it was my turn to spread the Gospel:  Be prepared.

I know that we need to get the generator serviced, that we need to decide where in our house we would go. We need to get all our important documents to the safety deposit box. We need canned food available in the cellar.  I know all this.   

It is just the beginning of tornado season. . .evidently. . .although I forget, and I get it mixed up with hurricane season which is at the other end of the year.  

And then there is my Mama, in the hospital in Greensboro, a week today.  It is Thursday.  She was supposed to go home Monday, then Tuesday, then Wednesday.  Her surgery for a broken hip last Friday night went well.  Supposedly.  But now. . .well there is the breathing, and the heart rate, and the fluid.  So on we go.  My sister is taking my place today.  It is a day of rest from being on the front lines.  No wonder I think about the battery supply.  And yet don’t want to do anything about it.  

It is just the tiniest bit unAmerican to be vulnerable.  Willingly vulnerable, to sit at my mother’s bedside without an agenda.  Each time I visit, I walk in like a sherpa.  I carry with me my laptop. In the side pocket of the carry case is at least one magazine, sometimes a book.  In my other bag are supplies:  water, kombucha, nuts, granola, my morning and evening meds in case I have to spend the night.  I carry all this up the elevator to the sixth floor and down the long hall.  And then I walk in the door and there is my sweet Mama in the bed.

I enter a different time zone,  a parallel universe, that doesn’t include spaces for reading magazines. Time follows the pace of my mother’s mood, her stories, her need for a bedpan or a sip of water.  Finding the nurse, a chance meeting with a doctor, getting her from bed to chair in that huge contraption so she can sit up and look out the window.  The centrifugal force of the Universe has narrowed to its center:  6N, Room 17 at Moses Cone Memorial Hospital, Greensboro, NC.  

Today is a respite.  My dear sister is going instead.  So maybe I will go get those batteries, and go to the bank with the documents, and maybe ask my sweet husband to take care of the generator this weekend.  And maybe Mama will get to go home in the next few days, and our tiny specks of lives will re-enter the swirling mass with fewer exclamation points.  Maybe we will carry a little more awareness with us, a little more presence, a little more gratitude.  Just maybe. . .

But first, this message. . .

So it is one of those days, in which you should feel differently than you do; but you don’t.  And you should be getting things done, but you aren’t.  You should feel differently because the dogwoods and the azaleas are in bloom; because you planted grapevines yesterday and because the first lonely scout asparagus is coming up.  You should feel better than you do because you have talked with both your son and your mother today, and they are doing well, you have fetched precious raw milk for your family and two others and had to drive through those flowering dogwoods and azaleas to get there.

But instead, someone, unknowingly, has reminded you of a poison center in your past and you have spent days working on questions about it, as this person is doing an analysis of the organization where this event took place.  And while you were working on answering the questions about these events some 25 years ago, this week, only a few days ago, a neighbor (your age) was stabbed several times and killed by her nephew. And then you realize that this is the same extended family where a young man took out a contract on his pregnant girlfriend and he is now serving two sentences for two murders.

And you ask yourself, why am I disturbed by composted memories when there is a family next door with two murderers and three murders to deal with? And you wonder, briefly, in the cavernous vacancy of their grief, would a casserole help?

But back to your troubles: while you were searching through 25-year-old memories, both of the queens died in your new beehives, and a beloved grandfather of beloved neighbors also died.  But the dogwoods and azaleas are still blooming.

And it is EasterTime.  Time of renewal and hopefulness.  And still, you feel the way you do.  Because that poison center, as much as you have worked on detoxing it, still bleeds.  And someone has poked it, again, and it still bleeds its toxins.  You have prayed and prayed some more.  You have been to therapy.  You have lit candles and more candles, and had fits and then prayed.

Eventually, you will move on.  You know that.  

You are on a diet so you can’t make yourself feel better like you sometimes do, and you are on a diet because of the number of times you have made yourself feel better that way.

Eventually, you will move on.

Meanwhile, the dogwoods and azaleas bloom. 

And it is time to make a casserole.

That Mama. . .

Right now, right this minute, I am going to pretend that I have been communicating with you all along, since last July, and that there isn't all this inertia to push past.  Because there is a lot to tell, a lot that has backed up, waiting. . .

In all that time, we have cleaned out my mother’s house in Tennessee - bless all whose houses are cleaned out by other people, and all those other people who clean out their relative’s houses - and moved her to Greensboro.  The move was precipitated by a startling discovery - that she wasn’t getting bathed regularly in her assisted living holding tank in Tennessee.  It was only after getting her here that we discovered she was on four times the dosage of Ativan that is recommended, putting her into a constant sleep state.  This while they parked her in the lobby.   

To our shame, we discovered all this, slowly, after moving her to Greensboro to a place that respects their residents, as well as truly cares for them. Greensboro is an hour and change for me and an equal distance for my sister, and now we happily visit with her once a week instead of a reluctant once per several months.  She was surly and difficult and whiney and full of what sounded like conspiracy theories in this other place.  We didn’t know. 

She was throwing food in the dining room, called the staff the police and the director The Commandant.  We didn’t know.

We didn’t know that they had her drugged.  We didn’t know that the staff was yelling at her, and not bathing her even though she was in Depends that she couldn’t change by herself.  That she was sitting in a wheelchair all day, put into bed at 7 p.m. and that they weren’t coming to help her get to the bathroom at night, so she was in a metal hospital bed with a thin rubber mattress and had to stay there until morning.  We didn't believe her when she tried to tell us all this, in a hushed frightened tone. 

“Why is she in a hospital bed?” asked the new young doctor on his first visit to her room in Greensboro.  We hadn’t thought about it.  Suddenly, it was clear she didn’t need to be, so here came a new Sleep Number bed, with beautiful bedding instead of thin worn institutional blankets. Suddenly she wasn’t incontinent since the staff responded to her call button and came to help her.  

“Why is she on all this Ativan?” We didn’t know that either.  Cautiously, he said, with steel undertone, “some institutions do this to keep their patients from being too much trouble.” We didn’t know.

Last week, as I sat across from her in a Sports Bar in Greensboro, trying to keep up with her analysis of the University of Tennessee football season, I was thinking instead of how beautiful she is.  She had her glass of wine and some bar food, while I sipped my tea.  

Pay attention, softly played in my head, pay close attention.

Life in the Faster Lane

I am having trouble finding my feet right now.  Maybe this is how surfers feel, as though there is a wave of energy underneath and the work is to do what needs doing to ride the ride.  We are just home from San Francisco, with all the shaking up that travel bestows, still aglow with the invigoration of time with Eamon and girlfriend Archana.  New restaurants, walks on the Embarcadero where the America's Cup is being staged, drives through wine country and the redwood forests and just the "its all possible" feeling that San Francisco emanates.  Try it, just try it and see what happens.

The kitchen garden at The French Laundry:

Perhaps that explains why after five years of roasting coffee, and after many years of developing recipes and baking for custom clients, and a couple of years at Farmer's Markets, I stopped the day after we got back at one of my favorite on-farm locations, The Bradford Store on Highway 73.  If you haven't been there, well, it is the quintessential country store, established in 1912, with a modern edge.  To the soft wooden floors and the creaky screen door, add organic produce grown in the surrounding fields.  Local cheeses, and meats, my friend Kelly's bread baked fresh that morning. . .its a dream, really.  (www.thebradfordstore.com)  The picture on the website does not do it justice.  Picture it surrounded by a cottage garden, a cabin selling antiques across the way, and behind it, a blacksmith shop and place to get organic supplies for the garden.

Anyway, while we were in California, a big storm blew out our Apple router, so no internet connection, a critical communication feature at our house.  This meant a trip to the Apple Store which took us right by The Bradford Store, and I needed to check with Kelly anyway because the coop to which we both belong was delivering that week.  While we were there, for some reason, perhaps only because it was time, or because I had been to San Francisco and "anything seemed possible", I asked Kim Bradford if she was still interested in a trial run of Briarpatch coffee.  She and a local farmer were busy unloading some beautiful ears of corn, but she looked up and quickly said yes.  We had talked about this a couple of years ago when we were both selling at the Huntersville Farmer's Market, but until now, I haven't felt well enough physically to make the commitment (hooray for getting one's thyroid function where it needs to be - another subject entirely.)

I don't know if you have ever done this, but it was as if my mouth flew open of its own accord.  I'm a planner, I mean a real planner.  I am never happier than when charting with a ruler and colored pens, making all manner of lists.  I don't always follow these plans, you understand, but that isn't entirely the point.  The making of the plans is where the real enjoyment lies.  Well anyway, my mouth flew open and asked the question, and there was no plan.  

None.  I had not done an inventory of the green coffee supply.  I have been hand labeling the bags.  I had not thought about marketing, as I've had all the business I wanted through word of mouth.  Suddenly, only after initiating all this, did the realization dawn:  Oops, I've got some catching up to do.

So, to make a week of focused activity short: despite years of disdaining same, Briarpatch Bakery and Beans now has a facebook page:  www.facebook.com/BriarpatchBakeryAndBeans, through which I've already gotten all manner of encouragement.  Thanks to Archana there is a website in the making.  I'm working on a new design for the bags. . .

God willin' and the creek don't rise, The Bradford Store will have Briarpatch Coffee tomorrow. . .all supportive incantations appreciated!

P.S.  Meanwhile, Mama has new hearing aids, and despite the fact that "the Queen" (Mom parlance for the director) showed up at her door with a a delegation of fellow residents to let her know she had hurt their feelings ("couldn't have been that bad," Mom said, "some of them were smiling, a little"), she seems to be doing better.  She did refer to her current digs as "the hell hole," but only a few times and that is an improvement.

Update. . .

I have been waiting until I had something to say, but since December and the last blog post, evidently nothing in my world has wanted to become story.  That hasn’t changed, really,  I am just getting a little worn out by the drought, by the lack of communication, the lack of digging down deep for the right word.  So this might be a little choppy as I wiggle down into a groove. I think the camera is down there somewhere, so stay tuned for visual aids. . .

And it isn’t really true that nothing has happened.  The rose-breasted grosbeaks flew through last week, the Paris Fashion Week of birds;  their black and white bodies splashed with a chest blaze of deepest pink.  How is that possible?  True to their couture nature, there are only a few, and they stay only briefly, on their way to more elegant climates.

There were three baby bunnies born under the back deck, and somehow, so far, the hawks have been distracted with other dinners.  Periodically, at dusk or in the early early morning, we will see gradually bigger rabbits under the bird feeders.

A couple of weeks ago, the goldfinches came through in a rush, emptying thistle feeders in a single day, here long enough to change from winter dull to startling yellow.  All three bluebird houses, right now, have parents slithering through the hole to feed little grey furballs of birds-to-be.  And just for our amusement, there is a house sparrow nest in the mouth of a giant metal chicken on the front porch.  

The old-fashioned irises have come and gone, the lavender ones under the maple and the cream and taupe ones in the big garden that break your heart with their scent of a grandmother’s perfume.  The winter kale is reaching to the skies with thick stalks and sweet yellow flowers.  I’m letting that garden go for awhile just for the bees.  The spring kale in the two cold frames is starting to realize the weather is too warm for its liking and I’ll need to finish harvesting in the next few days.  We ended up with continuous kale both because we like it and because I don’t do the kind of meticulous planning that a real farmer would.

I’m always kind of surprised by the garden.  It is always doing something unexpected and it doesn’t wait for me.  It doesn’t wait for me to realize it is time to plant this or harvest that.  It just goes on, independently, growing the seeds that happen to show up, without prejudice.

I could learn from that.  Whatever comes through, in its time, is fine.

I haven’t been so accommodating.  I didn’t want to go to Tennessee when my mother ended up in the hospital recently. I say “ended up” because it still isn’t exactly clear whether she engineered the little sidetrip away from her assisted living home, against which she seems to be constantly rebelling.  She just  turned ninety, and to celebrate the occasion she has started to use the “N” word, and had to be forcibly wheeled out of the dining room because she started yelling. The director pushed Mom in her wheelchair back to her apartment and got her into her recliner.  She had to leave for a moment and when she returned, Mom was sitting in the floor, claiming she had fallen, sitting in a position curiously like someone would be who had scooted herself into the floor.

Mom ended up in the hospital this last time because when her afternoon caregiver arrived on this particular day, Mom was breathing heavily and the caregiver couldn’t get her attention.  They both went to the emergency room, but the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong, but at ninety, they admit you anyway.  She was there for a week, with all manner of tests, meals brought to her in bed, a bevy of nurses commenting on her sweet smile.

When my sister Laura and I got there the morning after admission she told us she had gin in her hospital water carafe and that she had been on a ride in a casket.  I don’t know where the gin came from for as far as I know, since my Dad died, my mother has a decided preference for Kendall Jackson Chardonnay.  It was Kendall Jackson they took away from her about a month after she got to assisted living.  Evidently she was coming back from breakfast and drinking and dialing, going through her address book, calling people to come get her.

That may have been when her minister decided to stop coming to see her.  We’re not sure.  All we know is that it is now the assistant minister’s job and her visits seem to have slacked off as well. Anyway, at the close of last week’s Hospital Spa Vacation, the doctor said Mom had the beginnings of both congestive heart failure and “mild dementia.”

“Ha!” said the director of the assisted living place.  “Ha!” said their director of nursing.  “She knows exactly what she is doing.”  I guess the story of the casket ride convinced the doctor, and it couldn’t have helped that Mom’s hearing aids went completely dead, even with new batteries, so all the information she had to comment upon started out in her own head. True for me too sometimes.

So we are all along for the ride it seems.  Us, Mom, the kale, the new birds and bunnies.

It really has been a glorious Spring.  And now that I’ve broken the ice, maybe I can tell you about it more often.

A cardboard sign

What if the body is always on the way to resolution?  What if there really is order at the base of things, barely discernible, under the currents and we aren’t just making up laws to suit our puny human take on things. Or to assuage our trembling fears, that it is, indeed, all for naught? Is this part of the appeal of Christmas?  Of religion in general?

There is a story, onto which we can graft our own sensibilities.  A raft in these tumultuous seas, that calls to us.  A beacon, a star, something true, no matter what disorder washes our way.

I opened the door this early morning, in the dark, to place Coleman’s breakfast on the porch, where he has the least number of steps to the yard afterwards.  My breath froze.  Immediately  I thought of the man who stands at the corner on our way to the Interstate with his cardboard sign.  Ironically, he stands at the edge of a cemetery and behind that a church, and yet no one takes him in, neither cemetery nor church, and we have joked in our nervousness at seeing him day after day that he needs help with his marketing strategy, as the corner he has chosen is one where it is impossible for cars to stop.  Where is he on this frozen night.  I closed the lids on my cold frames to protect the lettuces.  Where is he? I handed him no money, no jacket even though we have a closet of extras.  And it is Christmas.

We will travel across the mountain today, Eamon, John and I will get in our car full of gasoline with the heated seats and we will take with us a big basket of presents:  lotions from a local salon  whose owners pledge sustainability and who serve on the board of the battered women’s shelter; indulgences for my diabetic mother that we’ve been baking for days:  brownies, blondies, cherry brioche, chocolate chocolate cherry scones.  I have cut everything in small pieces to help slow down the sugar rush, and I will tell the nurse that my mother has these.

I don’t want to go, frankly, but I will, and we won’t stay long even though the drive is four hours give or take.  We won’t stay long because it is too hard, and because we will have house guests that will arrive before we get back.  I say it is too hard and then I think of the  man on the corner and I have to say I don’t know what hard is.  My worries this Christmas are getting clean sheets on the beds before people need to sleep on them and embarrassment that I only got lights on the tree and I’ve run out of time.

It always feels as though I am running out of time, that we are running out of time.

Next . . .

We go on because we have to, and because we are breathing rhythmically, in and out, and therein is momentum, that combined with the turning and the rising and the setting. . .we go on.

We pay the bill, prepare the meal, wash the clothing.  We make the phone call; all because there is a "next", a time when the bill will be overdue, when the meal will be digested, the clothing worn and back in the hamper, when the information given over the phone will no longer be needed, will have evaporated.

We call into the next room to someone who is there, for now.  We make a lunch date, write an appointment on the calendar, remember that we forgot something that is now more urgent, all because we assume there is a "next."

And yet, as we do all these things one after another, there is a drag, there is a darkness that stretches to Newtown, Connecticut, to the black hole that began with. . .well, we honestly don't know where or how it began, but its focal point is a young man, was a young man, lost, lost, lost. It is unfathomable to most of us how one can be so lost that the only way home is. . .well, you know.

This lostness has reverberated around the world. And we are pulled by it, mesmerized by it, into deep deep confusion and sorrow.

I can't help but imagine that when Made-In-The-USA missiles fall out of the sky from an airplane driven by a computer and a faceless "operator" thousands of miles away, and they explode into a village, sometimes into a school in a place where we can't pronounce the names of the victims, where they won't be read out loud by the American president, where there won't be banner headlines declaring "Before Their Time," where the deaths won't be the topic on all the American news channels for days and days and days, where the reason won't be assiduously searched out, where people who kill innocents won't be said to need more services, where it won't be said that we finally must ensure that these people no longer have access to such weapons; I can't help but imagine that to those parents, to those families, to those communities, those deaths aren't just as heart and soul-numbingly inexplicable.

So perhaps, for a moment, maybe now, we acknowledge that they matter, all of them.  All of them matter.

Over the River and Through the Woods

The refrigerator is still a refugee camp, Thanksgiving leftovers awkwardly shoved in amongst the native juices, butter and that third a jar of salsa.  John has already left town for another meeting, so I'm left to my own to figure out what will freeze and what won't, whether the neighbors can be counted on to receive all that yogurt and half-loaves of chocolate brioche.

The house was full, from Wednesday through Sunday, one suitcase after another coming in the door, extra toothbrushes adorning the various sinks, different choruses of voices in the kitchen.  What all did we do?  I don't know.  What did we eat?  Pretty constantly is all I remember.  I got up way early and  went to bed a lot later than usual.  The dogs were delirious with all the extra attention.

The house was alive with the energy that comes from all these people in their twenties and thirties that are still hatching their dreams.  Sharing their stories with each other, taking off in jogging pants across this rural neighborhood, gently prodding the old folks about their elementary use of all this technology.

We cooked together, the barista amongst us made us all repeated coffee drinks with designs in the foam. . .amazing!  We played Flinch with my grandmother's cards well beyond bedtime.  We went to the woods to fell a Christmas tree.  We ate dinner in the greenhouse:

And then on Saturday, we packed a picnic with our leftovers and drove to see Mom/Grandma in her new digs.  We found her in the lobby at the assisted living facility where we moved her in September.  She's "in the tank" she calls it, because anytime she is left by herself in her apartment, she tends to try to move herself from wheelchair to wherever and she ends up on the floor.  After repeated versions of this, the staff now has her within sight most of the day.

She seems a lot older, a lot more fragile and a little whupped by all she has been through in the last few months:  two major surgeries, two bouts of rehab and being moved summarily from her home of 54 years into foreign territory.  Wouldn't we all be.  She will be 90 next April.

To have three of her four grandsons there at the same time, two of their girlfriends, and two of her four children and a son-in-law, well. . .she smiled the whole time.  "I just feel so full", she would say, as she would reach for yet another hand, as she would embrace us one more time.

Periodically, despite our trying to veer the conversation elsewhere, she would get this look in her eyes, "I just don't know what I'm doing here, " she would say, looking off into the distance.  My sister would tell her again, that her wheelchair wouldn't work so well in her house, and since she couldn't walk now, well, this was her best option. "Oh," she would say, "all right."

We all know it isn't, "all right", that is.  It isn't all right that she can't be home, that she can't be younger that she can't walk.  It isn't all right.  It isn't all right that she is physically and mentally this far away from us, that we can't hold her when she is lonely and frightened, or when we are, by all that has happened so quickly.

This dear dear woman.  All we can do is love her, deeply, thoroughly and constantly, in this jagged, flawed manner, in a way that can never repay her for all she has done for us, all that she is to us.

Thanksgiving, indeed.

And now. . .

Mom was readmitted to the hospital yesterday, taken from Rehab, which for the last week has been more housing than therapy, back across town to where she had the emergency surgery for her spinal stenosis on Tuesday, July 24th.  Her pain was unbearable by the Saturday before, which so happened to be the 9th anniversary of my father’s death, although I have no evidence that she consciously remembered this.  Since then, she has been to two of the three hospitals that he was in during his final ordeal.

By last night, through a series of MRI’s, she was on a morphine drip for a slipped disc, for which they have decided no additional surgery, and the plan as I understand it is for her to go back to Quillen Rehab for another try at therapy, this time with a different pain relief cocktail.

I am not calm about this.  I want to be.  I want to just let it go, let it go, let it go, create spaciousness around it and be nonreactive.  However, it makes me crazy.  I feel wild.  Underneath this calm exterior, I am screaming.  And, at this point, I’m not even sure why; not sure I can articulate it.

Except.

Here she is, in this body that is deconstructing, one piece at a time, and I want somebody to do  something.  Since the beginning of this particular episode (where was the beginning?  What do we count as the beginning?) this has felt like a cascade, and that has proven to be the case, and it feels to me that it is accelerating, that there will be no relief, that we are headed diagonally and jaggedly South, that our lives, those of the people who love this woman,  are going to be ragged for quite some time, long or short, it doesn’t matter, it is going to feel like an agonizing eternity.

That is what happens in these cases.  Or at least that is my experience.  I remember going to the hospital day after day when my father was “in care” as they say in British novels.  I may have told you this but I remember driving to “Cow and Coffee” the little locally owned shop that I clung to as my home away from home, where I ordered my afternoon mocha and sat with my journal and my newly acquired Power of Now. I remember driving away from my father’s room where he lay silent on that ventilator, in a state of deep. . .something.  I would look out the driver’s side window at all those people going about their “regular” business.  And I would look in my own window at myself, and hear “there is a woman whose father is dying who is driving to coffee.”  Or when I would be eating lunch, “there is a woman whose father is dying who is chewing tomato,” and on and on.

The center of the Universe had collapsed to the black hole that was my father’s hospital room.  And now?  Now it has done it again, and is centered on my mother, as she oscillates back and forth between hospital rooms at Quillen and at Johnson City Memorial and back again, hooked to machines and to pharmaceutical concoctions, tended the best we know how by people who know her and people who don’t, in concert.

Her personality shifts, as do her pain levels, and we can’t see inside - really - to see if any curing is happening.  Meanwhile, her past disappears.  Any tentative hold she may have had on family memories evaporates with the drugs.  She can’t conceive of, much less hold on to any notion of the future and what that might hold if she can just muster up enough faith to get there; faith that there is a place where she might not be in pain, as she has been for years, where she could go on trips with her church, recognize and enjoy her children and grandchildren, walk down the few steps on her back deck to feed her birds.

Maybe this will change.  Maybe there will be the magical combination of drugs and clarity and a miraculous injection of oom-pah-pah that she will engage a gear that we are all desperately trying to set in place as a possibility.

It doesn’t feel like it right now.  It feels like she is on her way out, inexorably.  And maybe that is why I feel like a wet dishrag.  A screaming, wild wet dishrag.  I want to reach across that mountain and shake her and beg her to take hold.  And yet, there is part of my body that shares her deep, deep fatigue.

What is wrong with leaving? I have advocated it for years, for myself, electively.  I have said out loud to the consternation of dear ones nearby, “If there is any way to achieve it, I want to have the means to leave, early on, while I still have full faculties, when I have the intuition that my work is done.”

A common cry these days.  Like most who think about it at all, I don’t want this messy, incredibly expensive, technologically impeded, horrific departure.  It isn’t necessary.  It isn’t desirable.  It isn’t respectful. It isn’t moral.

I hope I’m wrong.  I hope that is not where we are.  But it feels like it.  It feels like we want emergence from this into a brighter future more than Mom does.  We have more energy than she does.  To us, in different encasements, not 89 years old, not having just had surgery, and now with a slipped disc, and not in that kind of pain and drugged and and and, the future inherently feels bigger, more hopeful, more real. The future here, I mean, embodied.

. . .Oh, my goodness.

. . .I just reread that paragraph. . .Maybe that's the answer.  Maybe that's what I need to let go of.

Maybe Mom wants emergence from this into a brighter future just like we do. . .

Maybe that is where I can rest.

We'll see. . .

While we were gone. . .

you and I, zeroed in on a hospital room in Tennessee, Life at Briarpatch continued. . .

The Malabar spinach twined up its supports:

The grapevine hugged its trellis:

The pears swelled and began to blush:

And the rudbeckia gave its all:

It doesn't seem possible, really, as you head to the same elevator, to go up to the same room, wondering/dreading what you'll encounter this time, as you push through molasses to get dressed and do it again.  It doesn't seem possible that that spinach could so easily continue its journey, those grapevines continue to reach so effortlessly for the sun, those pears to just be so pear-like, kissed and blushing, the flowers to offer themselves so fully; all of it unhinged from, unaffected by this drama that seems to require so much more than  one has to give.

I come home to heal, to stand in the garden and marvel, to cut back some of the growth that just went on and on, while I spent the week struggling, from one moment to the next to just let go let go let go. Where periodically I would be surprised to feel the blood in my veins, to feel genuine hunger instead of just a need for more energy.

There was a baby hawk on the front feeder while I was gone, John told me, still wet, uncertain of how to stand there, undecided as to what to do next. John kept the hummingbird feeders cleaned and refilled, and now there is a new batch of these magical creatures, even tinier than their tiny parents, zipping and unzipping the air as they speed toward each other, unseating whomever is on the perch.

All this life, while Mom lies in the bed.  What does she want?  Does she want to be here, meaning alive at all?  Is she too tired at 89 to make the effort? We don't yet know.  When the anesthesia wears off, in a few weeks, when her surgical pain is diminished, maybe she will know, maybe then we will,  Meanwhile we wait.

What a grand waiting room. . .

Sunday the 29th - we're headed home. Mama isn't.

I don't know how to describe yesterday.  Words fail me.  That is fine, really, as we are leaving this morning. (Thank you Laura for really having to be in the office tomorrow and for Mom believing her, at least temporarily).  

I called early to get Mom's schedule for the day, so we could get there while she wasn't occupied with occupational or physical therapy.  Overnight caregiver Sandy told me she had slept well, good to hear, as that had been a problem. We got ourselves together, slowly, as by now we are moving through molasses, and got there late morning.  She was sound asleep, so asleep that when the OT Sweet Thang Adam came to get her, he said he would reschedule her for later in the day, just let her rest.

We waited around for awhile, catching up, watching her sleep like I remember doing with my son, rather in wonder at the Universes contained in that body.  We learned that she didn't have the clothes she needed, and there were other things that needed doing at her house in Greeneville, 45 minutes away.  Leaving the day sitter right there in the chair beside her, we left to get lunch and do the external chores.

The external chores took a little longer than we thought, as we decided to put one of her lights on a random timer, not knowing how long she will be completely gone from her house.  That meant a trip to the hardware store and then figuring out how to adapt the plug in her 50-plus year old house. We also figured out the day would be immeasurably improved if we stopped at a little gourmet chocolate shop in Jonesboro, and we could bring her some too.  We kept the caregiver informed and worked our way down the list, filling her birdfeeders, hiding her checkbook (not very well - burglary may not be a career choice for either of us), gathering up mail and newspapers. By the time we walked in with Starbuck's coffee for everyone, clothes, chocolates, books, magazines, papers, mail and an uncanny sense of foreboding, it was around 4 p.m.

She was livid.

"I hope nobody ever does you the way you have done me," she said, her eyes flashing and her face set in stone. Her daytime caregiver yesterday, the meekest of the rotation, shrunk back into her chair.  I knew immediately what she meant, but also knew I knew more than Mom did why she was so furious.  And because of that I also knew her feelings were completely unjustified, in my world.  They made complete sense in a world that has no past nor future connected to it, no context.  

We had abandoned her, after all she had done for us.  This was unforgivable, obviously.  She refused to talk about it; chose glaring instead, no matter our telling her, calmly and quietly, more than once, where we had been, as we unloaded bag after bag of the evidence.  

"I hope you never have to go through what you have put me through," she said, again, and again, after what I suppose were suitable pauses for emphasis. "To just leave me like that, just because I was asleep!. . ."

"That's fine," I finally said, after the third round of explanation was not melting the glacier stuck in that bed. Smiling (wearily I'm sure), I simply said, "we don't have to stay.  We can get all this unloaded and just go on.  That's OK too."  

That helped the tiniest bit, then lo and behold she was hit with leg cramps, which she needed somebody to massage. Laura had somehow slid further into favor already so when she offered to rub her legs, she was given permission and started in.  The Goddess was with me and when it was determined that bananas would help, I immediately grabbed the car keys.

I took the long route to the grocery, driving in complete wonderment at all this.  Perhaps I was and am delirious, but I realized her state of mind in receiving all this doesn't alter one whit what we are doing for her or our willingness to do it.  This is all rooted in something far deeper than gratitude or frustration or god-knows-what. . .

By the time I got back, with bananas and another meal for the caretaker, my sister had worked wonders, or the pain medication had, or time.  Mom smiled at me as I came in, and immediately said no to the bananas.  She said she was "overwhelmed with bananas."  

OK, that's fine. . .Lordy. . .

She had to go to the bathroom (I promise I'll make this part short).  The orderly that came to help her was a bit of a hunk and she was quite impressed although we didn't know that until later.  The drill is that she puts her arms around his neck and he leans in and puts his arms around her middle and hoists her up and into the wheelchair, takes her into the bathroom and when she's done, we do all this in reverse.

After she was back in bed and he had left, she said, "there sure are some good-looking men around here. I don't know what the protocol is.  I don't suppose it would do to kiss them while they are lifting you off the commode. . ."

We leave Johnson City for home this morning.  I'm already partially packed.  I can't thank you all enough for taking this journey with me.  We aren't done by any means, but it has helped so much to have this means of reaching you, and it has helped far more than I can express to have you reach back. . .a sustaining web for sure. . .

All blessings all around. . .

Mama News on Saturday the 28th. . .

Well, it wasn't pretty, but its done.  It took two large policeman and an afternoon of rerouting her worldview, but we got Mama moved yesterday from the Big Hospital to what she has already decided is the first circle of Hell. She is now in a shared room at the James H.and Cecile C. Quillen Rehabilitation Hospital parked on a knoll just above, it turns out, Laura's and my favorite Escape Restaurant.  We were there last night, PTSD, and when they didn't have a table, we fell into cushy leather seats at the bar.  They felt sorry for us and fed us. We took our shoes off and balanced our plates on our laps.

Yesterday afternoon was our second try at figuring out why when the rehab representatives came by her room at the Big Hospital Mom was determined they were not going to sell her a car.  

"What are they trying to sucker you into now?" she would say in a loud voice, each time she found out it was a Quillen representative in the room.  She would refuse to answer any of their questions, turn them over unilaterally to me or to Laura, then afterwards, every time, there would be at least thirty minutes of her telling us nobody was on her side, everybody was making decisions for her, and that we were essentially fools for buying what these people were pushing on her.  "If you don't want the car they are selling, you don't have to buy it," she would say.  The analogy worked for her far better than it worked for us, but we finally got it.

She didn't quite understand (or didn't want to accept) that rehab (translation:  exercise) was the next stage in All This.  Part of the problem is that All This is not one reality, as one might hope, but rather a collection of realities, varying according to when she had her last pain med and how recently we have both sat by her bed, one on each side, holding her hand. Regardless of how she is constructing How Things Are in the moment, what she unilaterally has yet to remember is that she was in excruciating, uncontrollable pain for weeks before this emergency spine surgery was scheduled.  She doesn't remember the years of back pain before that.  She told us day before yesterday that she was just a "little fatigued" and then they came and made her do this surgery, without her permission, that no one has consulted her, and that now she was in pain.

Bless her.  It must feel out of control, this life of hers.  It is, in a way.  Periodically, after we have been talking for awhile, she will admit that Dad made all her decisions (true) and that maybe she just got out of practice (also true).  This is after Laura has pointed out (again) that she turned over the decisions to one of us, and that we were just doing what she asked.  She can't drive anymore, she can't hear, she hasn't even been able to step down the few steps to her back patio to feed the birds she so loves.  She hasn't been able to go to the library or to church.  (Abby, the Minister for Seniors let it slip the other day when she came to visit that the Senior Minister, the Big Kahuna, is a little scared of Mom, so Abby comes instead .My guess is that she has told him one too many times, that no thanks, she didn't really want to pray with him.)

What we are finally getting is that all this is about choice, somehow, and about having some control over basic parts of life that are slipping inexorably away.  Quillen is not about choice.  Quillen is about getting her better so she doesn't have to spend the rest of her life in a nursing home.  That piece of the whole thing, regardless of how many languages we've used to try to translate it to her, is not sinking in.

We are all scared.  She is allergic to exercise and Quillen is all about exercise.  They are positively perky about exercise.  Mom is a Taurus; a 183-pound, 5 foot 2 Taurus with an attitude.  

I have already called over there to talk with her overnight sitter.  It is now 8:30 a.m.and supposedly my mother, who doesn't get out of bed - ever - before 9 a.m., is supposed to already be thirty minutes into occupational therapy, followed by physical therapy, followed by occupational therapy. . .you get the picture.  

Well, I guess I better quit being such a chicken and get my clothes on and get over there.  Maybe with all the dear prayers you have been sending, Laura and I will discover the Other Mother, the one who joked with the big policemen who came to get her yesterday, who waved like the queen as they were wheeling her out of her room on the transport stretcher. Mama Number Two who charmed the intake nurses at Quillen and agreed with them that yes, this was going to be a very nice experience indeed, that she had been looking forward to it. . .

Lordy. . .

We come home tomorrow and one of my brothers takes over, while we sit and stare into space for awhile.  I'll keep you posted. Thank you so much for doing the same.  I have appreciated the groundwire. . .

July 26th and Mama. . .

I don't know how Mama is this morning, as I have yet to get my act together and get over there.  As of last night, when Laura and I left her, she was mad.

It is not a matter of reading between the lines to figure out why, because there are not straight lines.  It is more a matter of discerning potholes through a shifting fog.  I think mostly she is mad because she is 89, although Laura said she said, while I was out of the room trying to negotiate getting her house cleaned, that she perked up when she realized her skin didn't look so bad for somebody that had been using it for "almost 100 years." 

She's right.  Perhaps a steady diet of Fig Newtons is the way to good color.

Before I left home, before the emergency part of this jerked me across the mountain, I ordered three books from Amazon to help me deal with the latest Mama chapter.  As I recall, they have titles something like: 1) There's Really No Way to Prepare; 2) This is Going to Be You Someday, No Matter How Many Supplements You Take:  and 3) Just Get Through It.  I don't remember what they are called, and they were delivered to my house probably just after I roared out of the driveway, cellphone tuned to the surgeon's office, prepared to beg.

I didn't have to.  The compassionate man, when he heard her latest symptoms, moved whatever it is you move around and "worked her in."  This was because the day before, she had lost the ability to walk, was in pain which could not be controlled, and had lost control of her bladder.  

She doesn't remember any of this, is mad because "people" made decisions for her without consulting her and if she wanted to die, well that was her business.  

Where do you start?

I started with a long, deep breath, because what I really wanted to do was clobber her.  I was sitting on the side of her bed, propped up with a quadruple Americano and Visine, holding her hand.  This was at the end of the third full day of this customized version of General Hospital.  I had just gotten off the phone after dealing with caregiver politics, had cleaned up some family politics that insulted the doctor, and I was ready for, let's just say, a change of planets.

I looked at her and smiled, which helped me not say what immediately came to mind.  Another deep breath.  She is so dear.  She really is, and I may have still said it a little strongly, but I just reminded her of Sunday and Sunday night and Monday and the trip to the ER for pain, and not being able to use her legs. And it was OK if she didn't remember, and it was OK if she wanted to just ease on out of here.  Understandable.  Sweet sister Laura, on the other side, chimed in with her side of the chorus, that she had had major surgery less than 24 hours before, that this pain was different than the pain she had when terrorist bone growth zeroed in on her spinal cord.  That we needed to just take this a little at a time.  It was OK.  It was really OK.  This was progress.  She was safe.

We all breathed a little more deeply. Laura asked Mom if she wanted a clean gown as her dinner coffee had gone awry.  "We're going to get you dressed up," I told her.  Smiling, she asked if she could have some perfume.  The nurses were able to find a lone bottle of Johnson's Baby Lotion that someone had left, a treasure.  We massaged her hands, her arms, her legs, her shoulders.

We had all come back to a less chaotic orbit.  A good time for us to leave.  Well, there is no good time, let's say opportune time, a time when we would be in marginally less trouble than other times.  Laura and I have done this tag teaming before, and we know one of the first orders of business in whatever town holds the hospital that holds the reason you are there is to search out the good restaurants.  The really good restaurants.  

Over a lovely meal, in a darkened room with white tablecloths and a perky waitress that wants to move to Asheville to pursue her dreams, urgencies receded.  By the time we shared the rosemary caramel truffles and speculated whether the gay date at the next table had gone well, there was a bigger life than Room 6408.  

Thank all of you for being part of that Bigger Life, for sending me news from that Life, for just hearing your voices in all the dear forms in which they have arrived.  Mama is better for it, honestly, and I know I am. . .

Much love. . .

July 25th and Mama. . .

The synopsis:  Mom made it through the surgery, is in a hospital bed about a block from this Hampton Inn, being circled by nurses I'm guessing. The surgeon described two of her vertebrae as being occluded with extra bone, pressing on her spinal cord.  She had been in accelerating pain, and as of Monday morning, all agreed she couldn't wait until the 31st, when her back surgery was originally scheduled.  So all over the place, plans were moved around, suitcases packed, OR's booked and here we are,  Johnson City, Tennessee, about 30 miles from her house.

I won't go into the details of my sweet mama throwing things at the caregivers, or that she asked me who I was when waking up from the surgery.  Or that we are at one of same hospitals, during the same time period when we said goodbye to my father nine years ago.  I won't try to describe the fashion scene, where evidently in Johnson City, Tennessee, it is de rigueur to wear one hospital gown forwards, another backwards and your flip flops as you escape to the parking lot with your cigarettes. My Mama quit some time ago, thank goodness. 

We will know more as time goes by.  Right now, it looks as though she will be in this hospital for another couple of days, then transfer to a rehab facility close by for maybe a couple of weeks.  Not sure when I'll be home, I need to be upfitted with more vegetables already, fewer power bars.  

I would be so grateful for prayers for Mama and notes to me of a part of the world that doesn't revolve simultaneously cherishing and letting go.  Well, maybe it all does, but I'd appreciate notes all the same. 

Love, blessings, and appreciation all around for your sweet caring about this,

On the way to Mama's. . .

We went ballooning. . .

Looking up:

Looking out:

Looking down:

When we got there, my mother was in her chair, with an ice pack on her lower back, hydrocodone and Ibuprofen doing their best.  The surgery for her spinal stenosis was cancelled when they discovered her heart had probably had an attack and something else.  So she goes to the cardiologist tomorrow.

"I don't know how I got here," she said, "I was going along just fine and then I was old."Her body is heavy from the sweets that seem to give her a bit of relief, but now there is the diabetes.  Her spirit is heavy too now.  During my last three visits, she has worried that she wasn't there for her mother when her Dad left them for another woman, more than sixty years ago.  She has a book that she bought that is supposed to help record memories.  Page after page asks questions and then holds open the space.  It is meant to be a gift from a grandparent to a child.  In the front of the book, she has stuck pictures of children I don't know.  The book is all blank.  I asked her several times if I could ask her some of the questions and maybe she could talk to me and I would write down the answers, but she just stared at me.  "I was supposed to do this," she said, "a long time ago." Four times she showed me a picture that she took off the refrigerator, telling me that these were my cousin's grandchildren.  Four times I said, "Well, isn't that something?"

There are foods in the freezer downstairs whose "best by" date is two years ago, but she wouldn't let me waste them by throwing them away.  The caretaker that was there is named Anna and is in her late seventies.  She showed me how to crochet and I showed her my knitting.  The last time we were there Mom called me afterwards to say she was mad at the caretakers because they took all my time.; how rude it was that they kept talking to me and that they talked more to me than they ever had to her.  My sister was with me that time and we both told Mom that yes, we talked to them because it was important that we got to know the people that were now so important in her care.  We didn't say what a gift it was to have a little new conversation and some relief from the weight of her decline.

As we left this time, Mom saying as usual with that look in her eyes that she didn't want us to go, and we as usual wanting desperately both to leave and to not leave her, Anna asked us where we lived. "Near Charlotte," we said, already taking some relief from having bags in the car. We all pretended that Anna was going to come and bring Mom, that they were going to pack bags in Greeneville and drive over the mountain this way, instead of the number of times, who knows how many, we will instead pack here and do the traveling.

My brothers arrive today, and will go tomorrow to the cardiologist with Mom and St. Sonja,  the main caretaker.  The doctor may or may not clear her for the surgery on her back.  If he doesn't the prognosis is increasing pain and decreasing control over her bladder and bowels.  "Who's going to want to take care of me then?" Mom asked, looking off into the distance.