April 2018
Day 22 and counting down…. 3000km from my home. hostility on all close family quarters
Rosie is a true blessing from God. Greta has been off the last few days, has a heel ulcer needing soaking and debriding, and dressing.
We sat out under the old hollow oak, now filled with bugs and microbiota. Even the furry animals are not making homes there anymore. Racquey and her four baby Rockies were there two summers ago, but not last year.
“I had the inspector over and the floor boards are shot!”.
The skunks are gone too.
Battalions of geese lift off the water through the mezzo area of the land, and break into view on the pale sky line in front of us. Fatty and Violet are eating. No Beav for two days. Lovely new ducks every day. No cormorants, herons or egrets, yet. Also all the little birds are arriving now too… a junco yesterday, many chickadees, of course our lovestruck cardinals….. etc.
So at this broken, unfinished doorstep,
My beautiful mother sits….. “Sitting here watching the world go by, Life sits high in me. Of all of the places that I have been I am right where I want to be, Where I want to be, ooooooooooo where I want to be…. Life is a river that never ends, Ever reaching the sea. We can’t see beyond this moment we have But you know that is what makes us free, It is what makes us free ooooooooo It is what makes us free…. and so on…." sings Jocelyn, somewhere in the great beyond, yet sitting so gently over my shoulder.
My mother looks as if she is beginning her crossing. She reaches out to something I cannot see,
I feel her angels, though,
her family, all of them,them telling her she belongs,
that she has a place forever in this menagerie of light and sound. This carnival.
I wonder in words with her, what she is seeing. We talk about her journey, Svend, Ada, Elizabeth, Jocelyn, Annie, Helen….. Yesterday, we were trying to remember the name of the old work horse who would plod down the hill with the milk cartons to reach the wagon collector. Was she really only seven or eight when her parents sent her down by herself? Rusty following along. Prolly.
My mother would wish I did not say Prolly. “Probably. speak properly.” Good english was always important to my Danish immigrant grandparents. There was no droppin’ g’s, if you knows what I means. And my mother was also very strict about this too. She wanted us all to get ahead, to be able to open our mouths and ‘speak to the best of them’. Who the ‘best of them’ were, remained a debate, but still, she liked good language.
When my friend Joanne says, ‘grab your mother and hold her tight’, I feel like I am grabbing her and holding her tight for all of us whose mothers have already gone to the sky world. Our mothers in the sky world….. What a chorus of Raging Grannies that is turning out to be… Where the wild things are, More like it!
My mom seems ready to fly from this perch.
I don’t know how that works from her perspective,
But from mine, I feel so very very proud of her.
So beautiful My Mother. So beautiful.
All of her life.