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Thoughts From The Battlefield
It's January but it is seventy degrees here so my mom has been watering the lawn. To my ridiculous assertion that it is the middle of winter and besides that--this town suffers from water shortages, she scoffs. She has a sprinkler system which breaks the lawn down into individual sections. Each section can be watered individually, or together with other sections, and in combinations so complex that you are caught smack dab in your smart ass face with the whip cream pie of reality that answers affirmatively to your whining past querulousness self which wondered aloud or to yourself in class--will we really need all this complex math crap in real life?
She seems to be able to figure out the controls well enough even though she is completely unsure of the time of the year. In fact, she loves controls now or anything with dials. The two thermostats in the house will in the course of the day spin from 50 to 85 and from heat to cool.
I upset her earlier in the day by trying to take her to the doctor again but she has forgotten that now and so we are starting fresh. She forgot that I had called in my brother for backup, and that that is why the front door and storm door were unlocked early this morning. She is blaming that on the replacement paper boy, whom she doesn't like. The regular paper boy, whom she likes very much, will go on vacation in May and possibly due to the unseasonably warm weather here, she thinks it is May, and that her paper boy has left her in the hands of "that other guy."
She had a boyfriend before dad and she would have married him but he got killed in WWII. Dad survived the war but cancer killed him 12 years ago.
She was juggled from parents to grandparents to an aunt in her early youth. She was a country girl who went to a big state university in the mid thirties, back in the day when they called role in class, and the great depression was not a distant memory. Her somewhat mysterious parents gave her a boy's name, she thinks it may have been the name of a horse on the family farm, and so in the big college classrooms she would endure the giggles of her more sophisticated classmates when an instructor would call out her name and in a broken voice almost as ridiculous as a callous boy making fun of a country hick with a high pitched voice, she would say--heeereuh.
After we have difficult converstations about the need for her to have a some hired assistance in the home, a thing she will not admit the need for, she might be found sitting on a short children's chair, stooping over to detail clean a return air vent, or the tracks of the sliding glass doors, and weeping.
On the bar by the dining table there are leaned pictures of grandchildren and great grandchildren whom she really doesn't know anymore. Lately to this grouping has been added a little snapshot of a drop dead handsome black man who worked in the off campus dormitory in which she lived as a college student. I wish she would talk about him more; he has a kind face, and I bet was nice to her.
By the way, I failed in that attempt to get her to the doctor. She's a good fighter, wily, determined, and focussed on nothing but the battle. I though, like the invader of a foreign land who is motivated by questionably good intentions, am clearly outgunned here and doomed to failure, or at best--a very unpleasant victory.