Inexorable Things, and Poppies

The late afternoon sun was perfect for illuminating these poppies and giving them a glowing color that needed no touch-ups in Photoshop.

In a month, it will be ten years since we moved into this house. I can't forget the first morning we woke here, to a quiet neighborhood and the sweet sound of birdsong. At that time there were maybe two or three spindly poppy plants on the back bank, which, along with the lawn, were dying for lack of water. We collected their seeds and sprinkled them on the dry ground, and were rewarded the following spring by a humble crowd of wildflowers.

Every winter since then, we've looked for the first poppy sprouts on the bank, a promise of spring to come soon.

I tried and failed to get hold of my mother's doctor today; but the caseworker from the Area Agency on Aging called me and we compared notes. Apparently my mother has been turning off the ringer on her phone. Now, does she know she's doing this? Is she doing it so that the phone doesn't ring while she's eating lunch, and then forget that she has? Is it her way of avoiding the caseworkers who try to call to schedule appointments? Connie the caseworker said she's turned the ringer on Mom's phone to the "On" setting twice now, after calling and calling and getting no answer.

Yesterday my mother-in-law tried to call, and getting no answer for the second day in a row, drove to Mom's house to see her. They had a nice visit, but Mother-in-law was appalled to see how thin and desiccated my mother looked. Forgetting to eat, perhaps?

Connie told me that last Monday, when she arrived to take my mother to her doctor's appointment, that (of course) my mother had forgotten about the appointment and tried to get out of it by saying she wasn't ready. Connie told her to go ahead and get ready, they had plenty of time, and while Ma was out of the room, Connie spoke to my sister, just chitchat. Amazingly, Jan answered her, and spoke to her ... until Mom scuttled back into the room and told Jan to stop showing off. Jan clammed up and spoke not another word. Still, I was elated to hear that Jan is still responsive -- she's been so quiet for so long that I worried that she had lost the ability to interact.

The consensus seems to be that Jan should be removed from my mother's home as soon as possible for not only her well-being, but her safety. If Mom can't remember to feed herself, is she actually remembering to take care of Jan? I know that it is going to cause upheaval in their lives, but I think that even in the short term, getting Jan out of that house could only be the best for her.

The other thing is the issue of my mother driving. She's already admitted to getting herself "lost" on her way to church once, and a friend called me to tell me he saved her ass when she hit a cloud of confusion at the local gas station and suddenly could not remember how to put gas in her little truck or how to pay for it; I've been instructed to tell her physician about the incidents, and in light of his evaluation of her condition, he will probably send paperwork to the Pennsylvania DMV to require her to go in for a driving test -- which I cannot imagine she would be able to pass.

She has good days sometimes, when her laugh sounds relaxed and easy, and she understands the things I tell her. I like to let those conversations hearken me back to the days 20 plus years ago when I lived in Pennsylvania, too, and we would meet in the earliest hours of the day to fish in the river while our respective households slept in. She was there to see me cast from 15 feet away into a tiny creek that emptied into the river -- and come up with a 17-inch trout, much to our surprise. Or the time we were surf-fishing on Hatteras Island, and I caught a little shark -- and Mom had to come to the rescue and take the hook from its mouth. The beast was still twitching and switching when we took it back to the cleaning station, and in shame for my earlier cowardice, I grasped it by the tail and whammed it hard on the wooden gutting table. I don't know that I ever remember my mother laughing that hard at anything else I ever did. (And she did appreciate the way I cooked the shark that day.)

There was a time when she was a good, good friend. Maybe in the next life we'll be able to recapture that friendship.