It’s not that the York, Maine library doesn’t have wireless. It does. But I have Ubuntu OS on my HP mini notebook and I couldn’t figure out how to connect. I couldn’t get on their help page because I couldn’t get on the Internet.

I can’t believe that I actually figured it out by myself. I guess there’s hope for me yet. Although I’m not sure how much more frustration I can put up with re Ubuntu. I can’t get any sound out of the machine. Bleh.

Since I am in Maine, I got in touch with Ronni Bennett to see if we might have a chance to grab a cup of tea before I leave tomorrow, but she’s just getting back from NYC, so it’s a no go this time. But I’ll be in York again at some point, and I’ll try again.

I can’t believe how frustrating it was not to be able to connect through my laptop. While there are terminals at the library that are for public use, it just isn’t the same thing. (And I don’t know my WordPress login info by heart; it’s stored on my laptop.)

Tomorrow, we leave for home, after a week of Boggle marathons, too much wine and Sea Breezes (the alcoholic kind),. and just about enough belly-laughing.

Not enough sun, but that’s Maine for you

Now I’m off to have lobster roll for lunch and poke around York Beach.

I keep wondering how long it will take for me to feel really settled in this next stage of my life — to adjust to a new physical state and a new mental state.

Massachusetts is very different from where I was living in New York. Needless to say, I was financially shocked to receive a $348 bill from the town for the “excise tax” for my car. Everyone in Massachusetts who owns a car pays an annual excise tax. Well, since there’s no sales tax on clothing and shoes, I suppose that’s only fair.

On a more positive note, it seems that I don’t have a co-pay for doctor’s appointments through Medicare. I guess it all balances out, especially since I’m in the middle of a round of doctor’s appointment to get my health stabilized — including starting physical therapy for my arthritic back.

Parts of my old life are still with me, though, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I will be traveling to visit my mother this weekend, although I’m not even sure that she will remember me. The live-in aide will be able to visit her family, and my brother will be able to have a few nights to himself. And then I will travel half-way back home and spend some time with my women friends, whom I have seen in months and months.

When I get back next week, I wonder if the Cardinal eggs in the bushes not too far from my back door will be hatched. Every day, we go out and check to see how mom and babies are doing (not too close, though; the dad scolds us insistently if we get too close). My grandson is excited about perhaps being able to see the babies still tucked into the nest. Of course, he gets excited about a lot things — spotting a Monarch butterfly, adding a model Brachiosaurus to his dinosaur collection, driving by a construction site while a grapple is working, watching an air force plane flying overhead, going fishing with his dad.

I used to get excited about all sorts of things. I seem to have forgotten how. Maybe I need some mental therapy as well as the physical.

Now I’ll go pack my car.

Stories begin somewhere in the bowels of truth. Do these things happen or do they not? Who is to know what is true? I only know my truth. And so I tell my story.

It is two days ago, and an April morning the likes of which we had been waiting for. I am sitting in a sun beam, leisurely eating a corn muffin, sipping a cup of green tea, and waiting for my mom to wake up. I am supposed to be in Albany, attending my friend’s quilt show and then getting together for mine and my women friends’ combined annual birthday celebration. But my mother is catching a cold and is feeling more miserable than usual.

He walks in, waving two different socks of hers, angrily accusing me of losing their mates in the wash. Later, I find the mates to those socks stuffed into the pocket of one of her jackets, along with balls of Kleenex and a comb. It doesn’t matter. As far as he’s concerned, anything that’s “missing” or “broken” is my fault. He will not let go of needing to blame me.

The newly hired live-in aide arrives the next day. She is a perfect “Mary Poppins” to my mom’s now childlike persona. She speaks Polish. She is kind and gentle and understanding. I wonder if he will wind up letting her go. Or, perhaps, like me, she will finally do the going.

My mother is more upset and upsetting than usual. Her nose is running. We think she has a fever. I catch her trying to bite into a paper plate and later find a wad of Kleenex in her mouth. She goes through boxes and boxes of the stuff — folding, shredding, tearing, and, apparently, trying to eat. She lashes out in frustration, smacking her hand against the wall, causing a wash of blue skin — just one more place on her body that will now hurt. Sometimes, when she’s quiet, when the air around her is quiet and we sit side by side on the edge of her bed, rocking and humming, she asks “What is happening to me?” “You just got old, mom,” I say, and start singing “Pack up all your cares and woes, here we go, singing low. Bye, bye Blackbird.”

And so I finally go, tired of the blaming, realizing that now he will have to find a way to coexist with the aide. She and I have similar approaches to caring for a frail, usually demented old woman, although she has a lot more practical experience than I. How will she deal with his enforcefullness (yes, I made that word up, but it says it all)? Will he let her do what she is there to do? He will need to let go of his need to control. I wonder if that is even possible.

My grandson’s cat Cuddles has not come home. It’s been two weeks since he escaped out the back door. They know he shows up in their yard at night because they have set up outdoor cameras. They leave food out for him. They bait traps with his food and their smelly clothes. So far they’ve caught a possum, a raccoon, and two tabby cats. But no Cuddles. My daughter goes out in the middle of the night and sits in the shadows, waiting to see if he might venture near. She said today that she just might have to let go of the idea of catching him. He will either come home or he won’t.

And my mother will either let go or she won’t.

And all I can do is tell my story.

“Jak sie lozko poscieli, tak na nim wyspacz,” was what the old women in my family said when we youngsters complained. “The way you make your bed, that’s how you have to sleep in it.”
I was thinking of this phrase as I drove from Massachusetts, via Albany, to my mother’s/brother’s. I was in Albany for an overnight so that I could get together with my long-time women friends for our annual holiday dinner.
When I got online today and read Ronni Bennett’s two most recent posts (Are You Satisfied With Your Life and The Real Economic Story), the admonitions of my female elders came to mind again. (Ronni always seems to be two steps ahead of me.)
While in Albany, I stayed with one of my friends whose home looks like the pages of a decorating magazine. I stayed in a guestroom bed, which was, well, lets just say, well made. It was a pleasure to lie on it and to wake up in it.

This friend, now retired, is not wealthy, but she is certainly is better off than I. She can afford a twice a month cleaning lady and someone to take care of her lawn and shrubs in the summer. If her driveway needs paving, she pays to have it done. She spends time where it’s warm when it’s cold here in the Northeast, and she pays an enormous amount for long-term care insurance. I think she diversified where she put her capital enough so that she wasn’t terribly affected by the Wall Street fiasco. She’s a few years younger than I, more than a few pounds lighter, and she’s always been more attractive. While there are times that I envy her lifestyle, ultimately and finally, I have to sleep in the bed that I made.
Am I satisfied with my life, as Ronni asks? I made my choices and took my chances, and things could be a lot worse. My only DISsatisfaction is that I’m not totally moved yet. Will I be satisfied then? I don’t know, but the last three years living in my brother’s house while I take care of my mother have been pretty miserable. So I guess it’s all relative.
Reading the Huffington Post links that Ronnie provided (here, here, and here) certainly makes me grateful for what I do have.
My bed might not be of designer quality, but at least I have one.

More to the point, I miss getting costumed up on Halloween.
At my last job (which lasted 20 years, and there’s lots of reasons why), my boss loved Halloween, and every year we all dressed up and made the rounds of all the offices.

This is some of us as Snow White and some of her dwarfs. That’s me on your bottom left, and that’s my boss behind me. Other years we dressed as the Seven Deadly Sins, Hogwart faculty (I wish I knew what happed to my costume for that; I wonder if I loaned it to someone), gangsters, and, of course witches. I’ve forgotten some of the other themes we used. There are photos, somewhere, but it was all before any of us had digital cameras, and they were never scanned in.
Two years ago, when my boss retired, she chose Halloween as the day for her farewell party, and she urged people to dress in costume. Of course, I did.
About six years ago, I went to a few dance parties as Medusa.
I guess that’s where my grandson gets his love of costumes. You sort of become whatever you wear.

Back #1: It was just a matter of time, I guess. Several nights ago, as I tried to lift my mother’s legs back onto her bed, I felt as though someone shoved a knife into the right side of the lower spine. It was a long night for me, as I painfully made my way to a chair, only to find it hurt too much to try and sit. Lots of Excedrin Back and Body later, I’m relatively OK as long as I don’t twist sideways or make a sudden move. I have a long history of problems with the right side of my body, including developing “drop foot” on my way to Harvard’s first BloggerCon five years ago. And it’s been all downhill from there.
Back #2: Despite the above, I wrapped an Ace lumbar support belt around myself, put on the cruise control, and drove out to see my daughter and family, who, I knew, would give me some TLC — which I needed for more reasons than my out of whack back. Luckily, I had left my new quarterstaff there, and that surely came in handy for limping around the yard.

[Side note: Ronni Bennett has a section of her blog dedicated to the "Quarterstaff Revolution," and I will be sending my photo to add to the growing collection.]
Back #3: Last week, I took a little trip back in time and finally got together with my college roommate and her husband, who live about a half-hour’s ride from here. Both she and her husband were good friends of mine all through college. She and I were the same size and coloring We shared a room and later an apartment right through grad school, and we also shared our wardrobes. She is still slim.. Our lives are about as opposite as possible these days, but the memories of all of the crazy college experiences we shared (including driving down to Daytona Beach for Spring break with three of our male classmates) are still ties that bind.
Back #4: Thanks to the Bush regime, this country is so democratically backward that we can only hope that the new president will have the strength and stamina to haul us back to where we belong. The latest indignity is PBS stalling about widely airing Torturing Democracy. It is, however, being aired by individual public stations, and you can watch it online.

I spent last weekend in a place as close to perfect as I’ve been in a long time. Good friends, good food, a good book, a lake, mountains, a spacious home with lots of decks, pitchers of Cosmos, and laughter-filled games of Boggle. I could have stayed there forever.
Now I’m back in the situation I should never gotten into, and I’m finalizing plans for my escape, with support from both the Hospice nurse and social worker. I would like to take my mother (92 years old and demented) with me, where we would be with our extended family in a home with beautiful gardens on a dead end street with lots of neighbors. She would have pleasant distractions from the painful movements of her body and mind. I would bring in the help we both need.
But my brother doesn’t want to let her go. And I just can’t stay.
As my hair grows gray, I need to spend more time in places of peace.

Four days free of caregiving!
I am heading out tomorrow with my gaggle of friends to Lake Luzerne, which is not far from Lake George, which, as fate would have it, is the site of the annual motorcycle Americade at the same time. No doubt, the roads will be crawling with hogs of all kinds and their wannabe relatives
Back in high school, I dated a guy with a motorcycle — unbeknownst to my parents of course. It might be fun to ride on one again. I mean, isn’t there some commercial where a grandmother rides in on the back of a bike that her grandson is driving? Hmm. Maybe I’ll run into a senior citizen biker.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out if the itchy bumps popping up on my arms are flea bites or hives or some sort. I can’t seem to find any fleas on my cat, but I know those critters are pretty tricky.
Also, meanwhile, the hospice nurse continues to check in on my mother. Mom somehow fractured a rib while I was gone a few weekends ago. While the pain seems to be finally subsiding, she is getting less and less stable on her feet and just is not happy about very much. The nurse brought in a young woman who played the guitar and sang, and my mother seemed to like that — although after they left, she was sure that they stole some of her jewelry.
I don’t know how my brother is going to handle four days and three nights taking care of mom on his own. If it were me, I’d hire someone to come in and help. I’m leaving a list of available private hires on the refrigerator and a stockpile of food that mom likes inside.
I am sooo out of here.

As the moment of the Solstice approached the beach at York, Maine, the sea turned an irridescent aqua and the sky poured up from it into a haze of that “sky-blue-pink” that no one believes is a real color — but it is. Real. And then the sun slipped behind the houses of the beach town, the sea vista slid into silver and then cerulean, and the stretch of sky above the dimly lit shoreline hung out a perfect slice of moon.

I had forgotton to bring my camera, what with having to remember all that paraphernalia. You know, Tibetan bell, rune stones, words — all that stuff of art and poetry and human hope. But more on that later.

For now, suffice it to say that I’m back from my five days at Long Sands, York Beach, with bronchitis and a low-grade strep infection that’s raging high-grade in my throat. Ya’ can’t win ‘em all.

Aside from a one-day trip north to Freeport to the L.L. Bean and The Children’s Place outlets, we spent most of the week reading and walking on the beach. This was usually my view when I was ensconced at the cottage (that’s my bare toe-polished foot sticking out in the middle of the picture):

As usual, I didn’t bring enough books to read, so I picked up a spur-of-the-moment paperback when we stopped at Hannaford. I Love You Like a Tomato — in the voice of a young female Italian immigrant, who keeps trying to make her grandmother’s Old World magic work in her troublesome new world. You don’t have to be Italian to love Chi Chi Maggiordino who, tries, as she says to “put to GOOD use the power of the Evil Eye.”

When I wasn’t reading, I was walking on the beach — usually without my camera. Except for the one really rainy day, when we went poking around the snail-covered rocks at low tide.

As it turned out, we spent the nicest day shopping. And eating lobster. Twice. And looking for toy rockets for my grandson.

There were supposed to be three of us, but it wound up there there were only two. When it came to our plans for the Solstice, however, we included the third in absentia. Three. You have to have three.