Memory -- I mean Memorial -- Day

Over the highway

They do nice things for bicyclists out here in the hinterland, you have to give us that. A perfect day  today, and I took full advantage. Warm air, but cool when you were moving, almost no wind.  I thought not once of my mother.

She is not uppermost, lately, in any case. It is the house sale and the condo purchase. We have been shelling out money much faster than we can make it, and scrambling to meet deadlines. Every so often when we come up for air we feel a little fizz of excitement, and I am less often weighing whether the loss of two months of the life I like will be worth the rest of my life in a condo. Gawd.

I saw Mom Thursday, Saturday and Sunday (yesterday). She is sinking into a confusion that makes it harder for her to keep track of my visits. I can't take an optimistic view of this. We went to the 10 a.m. chapel service yesterday and by 10:07 she was sound asleep. I prodded her awake and asked her if she wanted to lay down, and she muttered that she did, and we went up and got her into bed and she slept so soundly that she didn't start or panic when I left.

Still there are moments. She combed her hair in the mirror before church -- flipping it, touching it, looking left and right. They were the exact movements I've seen my whole life. No diminishment in this. You may suspect your mind isn't right, but, dammit, you can at least look like it is.

Turning out for Memorial Day 

Good news, bad news, no news

What it is. 

Hey friends. It's been almost a month, and I just really haven't had any time. The house is nearly empty of our stuff and restocked with "staging" furniture, so it's like living in a museum. Or, say, a window display at Nordstrom.

We put it on the market at about 5 p.m. last Thursday. There were 30 showings in 24 hours, and at the end of it we had an offer over our asking price. Bully! But we have to shore up the chimney (maybe you can see that it tilts a little bit), and do something about our back porch windows.

We have an offer on a condo downtown, but we've been back and forth with the owners (through attorneys -- how do I get into that racket?), and so we'll know more in a couple days. The owners are, I think, excessively risk-averse. Julie and I are living and breathing it at the moment.

And Mom, sigh, Mom. I've seen her less lately -- just twice a week for the last couple weeks -- and my visits have been shorter. Today at chapel she was perky and chatty, pointing out people she knew, but inside of 10 minutes her frozen face had returned, and finally I asked her if she wanted to leave, but no. So we stuck it out.

We made our Bistro visit short -- the bathroom called -- and I left her at the lunch table upstairs. She tries to wheedle out of me where I'm going, what I'm going to do, and I just say I got a lot to do, and she relents and thanks me for coming. It's a little formal, somehow, and it hurts just a little bit.

I think she's reached a state of stasis, or, you might say, found a cruising altitude. Not very high, very little turbulence.

A woman who ate in Mom's small dining room died recently -- Eva. She and her husband used to  speak German over dinner. So now he eats alone. He's got a boyish face and build, a nice man. It's strange because he was the one receiving higher care, and she lived in the independent wing in her own apartment. There's just no logic to any of this.

This is how I found my car when I got down to the parking lot:

So much fun.