Getting Back on Track

We went to my Grandmother's funeral last week. Mark was a Pall Bearer and was scared for some reason that he would fall down. He did not.


Mark was sick before we left on the long drive to Cape Breton, and by the time we were driving back, I was sick too. We both have a long-lived, miserable, energy-draining sort of mild flu. Congested sinuses, headaches, weakness, runny noses, hurty lungs, the usual wonderful assortment.

By the time I started to feel better, after being away and then being too sick to deal with very much, my house was unrecognizable. Visible piles of dirt, dog hair, and dust coated the floor. The kitchen was overflowing with dirty dishes. Papers, clothes, and other assorted debris covered every flat surface. To top it all off, my back had been hurting for about a week and I couldn't lift anything bigger than a cat. Laundry baskets were impossible, and the vacuum would have to wait. I swept, and my back twinged.

Slowly, things are righting themselves. My back is 95% better (even when I lift things), my flu is about 80% gone, and room by room, the house is returning to a somewhat un-embarrassing state.

Life is a series of chaotic events. I keep expecting it not to be, but that's what keeps happening. It's good to be feeling somewhat healthy again though, and when the clutter in my house is dealt with, I will feel even better. Time to go clean.

Another Goodbye

Well, my Grandmother died today.

My poor mother sounded so very sad on the phone. It's my job to tell my siblings, but OF COURSE neither one of them is online or answering a phone.

I think she couldn't breathe any more. She was only really in pain for a short time, thankfully.

I am sad for my mother, and worried about my Grandfather. I guess some sort of funeral will happen. I don't know when.


Death in the spring seems sadder. It's like, we all lived through a cold hard winter, and now that things are renewing themselves, it doesn't seem fair that life should come to an end before the flowers bloom. It's been so many months since flowers have bloomed outside - and just as they are starting to poke their heads through the thawing earth, my Grandmother has died.

She made it through the winter. She should have been here to see the flowers.

Invisible Donuts

So we've been staying in a hotel in Cape Breton for a number of days now, and our stay at this hotel has been, well, a bit weird. This is a fairly remote corner of the country with... ahh... a slightly different culture than we are used to. People here are friendly but boisterous and intrusive. It's kind of like they think everyone here is family, so people take liberties, even with strangers. It all seems very unmalicious though. Does any of this make any sense?

Anyway.

So we're at the hotel. On our first morning here, we straightened away a bit of our clutter and left for the day to visit my grandmother in the hospital. It was a long day and we didn't arrive back at the hotel again until after dark. We walked down the long, quiet hallway to our room and unlocked the door. Every light in our room was off, but there was noise within. We looked at each other and paused. Had they given our room away to someone else? What was going on?

We gingerly stepped into the room and discovered that our tv was on. It had most definitely not been on when we left. We laughed at the vision of the cleaning lady sitting on the edge of the bed amongst our luggage, watching her soaps. We turned off the tv and thought nothing more of it.

The next day we got up and repeated our routine, leaving in the morning and returning to the room after dark. Again, the tv was on in the otherwise completely dark room. We had a great laugh about that as we walked into the room.

My sister wandered over to our pile of snacks, paused for a moment, and then asked us how many donuts we'd been in possession of that morning. Out of a bag of a dozen, we were missing the three donuts we'd eaten that morning, plus one more.

The maid, while watching our tv in our hotel room, had helped herself to one of our donuts.

The maid ate our food.

I am dumbfounded. We cracked up laughing and my sister said she'd write a nasty letter to the hotel chain when she got home. I just keep thinking: seriously? The maid ate our donuts? Seriously?

Wow.

Strength in Numbers

Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.

~Anthony Brandt

The Coal Miner's Wife

Insanity ruled this week.

On top of all the errands and tasks associated with creating a non-profit organization, there have been animal health issues to deal with (everyone's okay) and family issues to deal with on top of that (everyone's not quite okay).

My maternal grandmother, a sweet little woman who has been fighting cancer for years, was rushed to the hospital in extreme pain a couple of days ago. It was touch and go but she is stable for the moment.

When this happened my poor mother was in the Dominican Republic - my parents were on a vacation they'd been planning for months. They're still there.

I think it's been torture for them for the following reasons:

• Tropical vacation ruined.
• Loved one deathly ill, thousands of miles away, while
• they can't get an earlier flight home, and
• they can't even really get a phone connection out of the country.
  

There they are, sitting in paradise, which is now a prison for them, waiting for the hours to tick down until their regularly scheduled flight, hoping that Nanny's health doesn't deteriorate further while they are waiting, and also hoping there are no flight delays once it's time to fly.

I've been calling my mother multiple times a day to give her updates. She has a lot of trouble phoning out of the country, but incoming calls seem to go through fine, and only get dropped once in a while. Every time we talk, we schedule the next phone call so that she'll be sure to be in her room. Then, when the time comes, I phone her old homestead in Cape Breton, get an update, and then phone the Dominican and relay information.

They'll be home tomorrow morning, and after exchanging bathing suits for snow boots, will be on their way to Cape Breton. I think Mark and I are going sometime next week.


I have memories of arriving at that warm little house as a child and getting to choose from three different kinds of home-made pie to eat. I remember wandering the wild blueberry fields behind the house. If we picked enough blueberries, another home-made pie would be made. It seemed that everyone in town stopped by that house at one time or another, long enough to enter the back door and sit at the kitchen table for a cup of tea or, as appropriate, a drink of moonshine (again, home-made).

It will be good to go back, even under these circumstances. I will enter the door and see my mother and her sisters busy at the kitchen counter, instead of my Grandmother. We'll have tea; we'll talk. Everything will be the same but different.

Photo courtesy of my mother.