| This is a dire situation.
Bill and Mike have posted since I have.
More than once. Desperate
measures are called for: I must post.
[Since starting this, I also found out my friend, Kathy, checks my Xanga
every day, and for a very long time, there has been nothing for her to check.]
Our news, in no particular order:
We’ve had highs of over 100° almost every day for the last
month. The highest we noticed was
110°. The car air conditioner has been
out for most of that time. (They said
it would cost $1200-$1500 to fix it, and we can’t do that now.) At least, that has helped us adapt to the
heat. Yesterday, we had temperatures in
the 90s, which was wonderful, and rain (we’ve gotten maybe an inch of rain this
month altogether). I spent several
hours outside working in the yard and fixing our front porch steps. I wasn’t able to finish, so Bryan got
multiple “don’t fall off the porch!” messages from us, including a
hand-lettered note on the inside of the front door.
We had a garage sale to find homes for some of my Aunt
Tressie’s things. The process of going
through them has been fascinating. (I
wrote about it for my column last month; see below.)
We got home at 1:00 a.m. Sunday after the sale, exhausted,
and couldn’t wake up in time to get to our church, so Jessa & Genny visited
a small Charismatic church near where we live.
The pastor – without knowing about Genn’s health problems – asked her if
he could pray for her. He prayed, then
said he believed she was healed. Up to that day, she had still been falling at
least 10 times a day, even after 6 weeks of therapy. She’s only fallen twice in the two and a half weeks since then,
when she was very tired or dizzy. I’ll
let her tell the longer version of the story. J (Genny’s finishing up her last week of
physical therapy, anyway, because continuing to strengthen her back muscles is
a good thing, and, hey! it’s paid for.)
We’re awed and thankful.
Genny’s still struggling with depression, though, and
trouble concentrating. I never know
when she’ll be able to homeschool with Jessa and me. That reminds me: did you ever notice… when non-homeschoolers use
the word “homeschool,” they use it as a noun (i.e. “So you go to
homeschool…”). When homeschoolers use
the word, they use it as a verb (i.e. “We homeschool.”)
I got a glucometer two weeks after I was diagnosed with
diabetes. For anyone interested in this
sort of thing: I’ve been testing for three weeks now. This week, my average pre-meal blood sugar level is 96, and my
average one-hour-after-meal blood sugar level is 126 (9 and 18 points,
respectively, less than they were the first week). And I've lost 5 pounds since the diagnosis, making 11 in all.
I got a call from my sister,
Vicki, yesterday. Mother’s on hospice
care. Her doctor had said some time ago
to let him know when she needed a hospital bed, and Vicki told him at the last
visit that she did, and he called hospice for her then. Suddenly, there are volunteers, a social
worker, a hospital bed, someone to give our mother baths three days a week… I
wish we had known all this help was available to her weeks ago. Vicki’s been overwhelmed, and with Genny’s
health problems and all, we haven’t been able to help her anywhere near as much
as we wanted to.
Mother has stopped eating, last I
heard. Yesterday, Vicki couldn’t even
persuade her to drink a milkshake, which is unheard of. We’re getting ready to drive out soon. I haven’t been able to talk to her on the
phone the last two times I tried. She
seems to have forgotten how it works.
Our favorite coffee house closed,
and we miss it. Vicki and I both have
work in an art show: my paintings and her jewelry. I may have mentioned that.
I don’t remember.
I will miss my mother very much
when she dies. But she’s confused and
desperately unhappy, and I honestly hope it happens before she forgets who I
am. Sometimes, she thinks I’m her
sister, which is all right, and ever since her sister died, I don’t tell her
otherwise. Please pray, as I know you
will.
I’ve probably forgotten something
I should mention. I’ll post again soon.
The
article: Industry, perseverance, and frugality make fortune yield. – Benjamin
Franklin
Packing lunch-box meals will be a “breeze” instead of a
“headache” now that you can reach into the Food Freezer and pull out
ready-packed frozen sandwiches – fruits and beverages – and place them in the
lunch box at the last minute. – The New Thrills of Freezing with your
Frigidaire Food Freezer © 1949
Most anyone could have misunderstood what you fired me
over - understanding you to say you wanted “my expense folder” instead of “Mike
Spence folder”. – excerpt from a letter of resignation
My Aunt Tressie died earlier this year at the venerable age
of 90, feisty and opinionated to the last. Her husband had died 14 years before
and they never had children, so the job of sorting through her things fell to
my sister and me. As the family historian/nerd/packrat, I drew the job of going
through her letters, and she kept every letter she ever got. The only way a
piece of paper ever left her house was by means of the United States Postal
Service.
I found boxes and boxes of letters, many with careful
notations on the envelopes. Letters requesting charitable donations with
handwritten notes on the envelope: “received address labels; sent $2.00 March
14, 1972.” The letter telling her that her cousin’s daughter, Anne, had died in
a car accident as she walked near her college dorm, with Tressie’s first
attempt at a letter of comfort written on the outside of a business envelope,
and the reply, telling how much her reminder of the promise of heaven had
meant.
She had a temper. There was a letter of resignation written
in 1956, the carbon copy still smoldering. More recently, a letter to a
fruitcake company demanding they send her order immediately, with a few snappy
statistics of how many minutes she had spent on hold, being transferred from
one department to another. Half the fruitcake was still in her refrigerator.
She kept the box, the instruction manual and the original
dated cash register receipt of every appliance she ever owned. She never bought
anything second-hand, she bought the best-known brands, and she never got rid
of an appliance just because a newer model came along.
I inherited her 1983 Ford Crown Victoria sedan. It still has
only 63,000 miles on it, and not even a tiny scratch. Of course, I found the
original purchase receipt among her papers.
She clipped recipes, too. My daughter, Jessa, and I have
made our way through The Spam Era, The Crisco Era, The Jell-O Era. We’ve
learned to make “Spam Boats” and piecrusts made of Rice Crispy Treats. I remember
the world used to contain a lot more things made of Jell-O, canned fruit and
cottage cheese when I was a child, and I now have documented evidence that I
was right.
She and my mother came of age during the Great Depression,
and they learned to be frugal. Tressie’s and Lawrence’s bank statements showed
a slowly growing snowball of savings, added to month-by-month, year-by-year.
Her garage had shelves filled with jars of preserved fruit that could no longer
be identified by color, all a uniform brown.
There were presents we had given her through the years,
still in their original boxes. A ceramic seashell holding bath products had sat
on her bathroom countertop unused for 30 years, still wrapped in plastic.
She kept every card and letter I ever sent her, every school
picture, every childish drawing. There were yearly birthday cards to “my
darling wife” from my uncle, not usually a demonstrative man. Correspondence
with people I barely remembered, spanning decades. Family pictures covered her
dressers and her piano.
During her final stay in the
hospital, the extended family – my husband, children, mother, aunt, uncle,
cousins, sister, nieces and nephews – had gathered, some of us seeing each
other for the first time in years. We were talking loudly in her hospital room.
Tressie had a hole in her duodenum, and she could barely speak, but she managed
to whisper, “Shut up.” But later, as we were leaving her room, her last words
to us were, “I love you.” |
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