Mom-Sequiturs

This morning Mom was reading a book she picked out of the living room bookshelf. It was a large hardcover. With standard type. I had been getting large type and, preferably, softcover books from the library for her because she can't read normal size printing and regular books are too heavy and tiring for her to hold for any length of time.

When I mentioned to her she was reading a standard book she looked at it and said with a note of surprise, "Well, so I am."

When I went to give her her morning eye drops I apologized for interrupting her. She put the book down and said, "That's O.K. I've read it before. I just don't know if they'll ever complete that contract. Although they do in the end."

More Irrational Exuberance (and Some Reality)

As I was out walking this morning I noticed two new Century 21 For Sale signs up in the neighborhood. The new house under construction has the cinder block walls up (including the faux buttresses on the front), the interior framing is in, and the crew was starting to lay tarp on the plywood sub roofing. So much for the exuberance.

The irrational part is all this is happening while yet another house (just around the corner) has been abandoned. All the furniture is out and the lawn is growing rank. Not one of the other abandoned places has been taken up nor have any of the other For Sale signs produced results.

On the bright side, I passed a great blue heron on my walk this morning standing by the side of the canal. More than a dozen ibis were grubbing in the back yard when I got back. And two eagles swooped (very) low over the house yesterday.

The Wild Life

We live in a stereotypical suburban development.

Earlier this winter, my brother heard loud noises in the ceiling crawl space. After some fumbling around with ladders and flashlights we determined that a raccoon had taken possession of the attic. My brother chased it out and found a loose board under an eave above a projection that allowed the beastie to climb up and in. He reattached it and the attic has remained vacant.

In January, something ate through the connecting hose between the dishwasher and the sink drain. My brother replaced the hose and set a mousetrap under the sink. When that was tripped to no effect, he went out and bought a much larger rat trap but the rat was way too smart for that. It did make the mistake of coming out while I was up, though. It was huge, fat, sleek and beautiful. I chased it along the edge of the living room and behind the bookcase. When it came out the other side I was afraid it was going for my brother's room but it took a left into the laundry room instead. I blocked off the space under the laundry room door and chased it into the garage (which door has a step and therefor no clearance allowing re-entry). It hasn't returned that I know of but it was fastidiously clean and (unlike a mouse) left no indication of it's presence anywhere visible.

A few nights ago, as I was sitting in the living room, I noticed a little face pushed up against the glass door to the lanai (the wall between the living room and lanai consists of three floor-to-ceiling glass panels one of which slides open). It was an opossum. I went to the door and waved at it to no effect. So I took the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog (which has multiple offerings of expensive high tech toys and cleaning robots and shoes and slippers for sufferers of plantars fascitis (hey, it's their demographic) but not one thing (I checked) for removing 'possums from your back porch) and slapped the glass with it. It moved to look around the catalog. So I turned on the lanai light. It blinked, assumed it was now daylight, and slowly walked back to the hot tub where there is apparently a hole in the screen big enough for a 'possum to get through.

Yesterday, as my brother was carrying groceries in from his truck, he had to stop at the front door to say hello to a rabbit that was hanging out with one of the gnomes. Last night the opossum was back in the lanai peering into the living room again.

We live in a stereotypical suburban development. Really.

Making Lemonade

My brother picked some huge ripe lemons from the tree the other day and when he carried them into the house he said, "Mom, look at the lemons."

To which she replied, "What?"

"Lemons," he said holding out the armful. And then louder: "Lemons."

"What?"

I joined him. "Lemons!" we both shouted. "Big, ripe, yellow lemons!"

"I don't understand."

"LEMONS!!"

"Oh," she said, not entirely convincingly. We gave up.

I don't think the incident was due entirely to her deafness. I think she really didn't understand the word, at least for a minute or so. Showing them to her didn't help, either, in my opinion, since they are so large and round they don't look like lemons except for being too yellow to be oranges and not quite big enough to be grapefruit (all of which are growing in the yard and ripening about now). They're sitting on the kitchen counter now and, just to be safe, my brother took a marker and wrote a big "L" on each one.

So far so good.

Claiming Territories

This morning there was a mockingbird perched overhead calling out a series of complicated and varied snatches of song, all either doubled or tripled, all saying the same thing in as many different ways as he could manage: "This is my spot. Mine. I own it. Get off my lawn!"

Of course, it sounds better in bird.

Also, I saw the burrowing owl at the constricted site again. But then there was only one at the median site, so I'm not sure if there are really three in the area or if the one from constricted was just visiting median the other day.

Reading Redux

I got a little ambitious, apparently, in my choices for Mom's reading. The last book I took out from the library for her was McCall Smith's Double Comfort Safari Club. She didn't like that at all. She claimed it was because she'd read it several years before and didn't like it then but the copyright is 2010 so that's not the case. I think she just couldn't cope with the foreign names.

Mom has developed a kind of faux deja vu. She frequently thinks she's seen or read things before that are just not possible: live sporting events, newly published books, etc. When I point out the temporal paradoxes, she accuses me of not believing her. Which is true.

While I try to let a lot of things slide, for some reason this one gets to me. Forgetting words, mixing up names, even an increasingly random sense of time are all OK. For some reason this deja vu thing seems a more ominous indicator of the path she is on. Since it's not going to change for the better, I just need to learn to let it go, too.

I'll get her a new mystery set in England or the US.