Mom, A Life: Part Eight

Mom, A Life: Part Seven

Sunshine, Real Estate and Art

Using the money from the sale of the Connecticut house and the property in Arizona, Mom and Dad built a new, small ranch house on the property they had bought on the north end of town. Unfortunately, the developers had opened up huge tracts all at once and so people moving into town bought and built all over resulting in isolated houses on barren streets across the peninsula.

The city was billed as a planned community but it was really just an artificial one. No plans were made for any commercial development commensurate with the expected residential population. Hundreds of miles of canals were dug across the city but, in an attempt to save money and with total disregard for future traffic growth, bridges across the canals were intentionally built narrower than the roads. To this day the city hall, police department and post office all sit in the middle of nowhere, miles from the naturally developing center of town as does the library (but in a different direction).

So, of course, Mom and Dad got their real estate licenses. At first they sold houses and condos as agents for a larger firm. Mom's heart wasn't really in the profession and she ended up mostly sitting open houses and model condos. After a couple of years they realized it would be decades before their "neighborhood" filled in and they bought a condo in an 8-unit building "downtown." At least it was within walking distance to stores.

Mom requalified as a nurse in Florida and did some work at the local hospital but didn't enjoy it saying the profession had changed too much over the years for her to really keep up. The technical aspects were difficult as were all the new drugs to memorize.

It was about this time that Mom and Dad came back up north and kidnapped my brother and his dog. My brother had moved in with me after mustering out of the Air Force and brought the dog with him from California but he was showing symptoms of depression, partly from his military experiences, including scraping two of his pilot friends off the runway when they'd crashed, and the death of his best friend, an innocent bystander in a high-speed police chase in Connecticut. They thought a change of scene would do him good, showed up one weekend, packed him up and took off. It worked.

Dad opened his own agency but it didn't really go anywhere until he met some commercial developers and started specializing in buying up and consolidating lots into workable commercial size properties. Mom left the business and concentrated on her artwork. She had enjoyed painting over the years, mostly still lifes in oil on canvasboard although she did a huge owl with glowing yellow eyes in acrylics on cloth and hung it at the top of the back stairs in Connecticut where it scared her grandson so much he would only ever use the front stairs. They moved again, this time to a larger higher-end condo where Mom figured out how to make beads from rose petals and began creating necklaces and earrings, some of which she sold, some of which she gave away and some of which are now in the local historical society collection. It was also around this time that she became interested in ceramics.

At first Mom was content to decorate premade greenware, experimenting with paint effects and glazes. Soon, however, she started creating completely original works, mostly flowers: roses, chrysanthemums and lily pads although she also did some dessert dishes and rice bowls. She took lessons at the senior center and eventually the staff asked if she would teach the class, which she did until her fine motor skills started to go and her work became clunky. Eventually she went back to using greenware and finally stopped when her painting started getting muddy, too.

Succumbing to the Gypsy urge one last time, Mom and Dad sold the condo and built a last house, the one my brother and I now share, in a neighborhood that was finally filling in.

It Just Doesn't Get Any Better

This has been pretty much the perfect day, so far.

Mom went to bed late (for her) and woke up early (for her) but most importantly slept through the night. She was bright and alert when she arose.

Mom received a phone call from an old friend this morning. The two of them had a nice chat. The conversation did take twice as long as it would have under normal circumstances but since it involved two semi-deaf old ladies half of it consisted of "What did you say/do?" and "No, I said. . .". Still, Mom didn't sound a day over eighty. And when she hung up she recounted some of it to me. (Seems her friend, who is near Mom's age but still has most of her faculties, has finally had to give up driving and isn't yet used to having family chauffeur her around.)

The only weird part of the day was the excessive praise for her "wonderful, amazing" breakfast just because I put fresh strawberries on her chocolate Cheerios.

Otherwise, it's warm and sunny, the doors and windows are open, my brother picked a newly-blossomed rose (that actually smells like a rose, unlike the store-bought kind) and put it on Mom's table where she is sitting with a cup of coffee and a fresh bunch of grapes reading her book.

If only we could just freeze things as they are right now.

The Coming Flood

It's kind of like being downstream from a burst dam. You can see the waters coming, rising inexorably, and know there is no way to escape them. Best thing to do is just climb onto the roof and hope the foundations hold.

The political advertising has started.

We watched it start in Iowa, flow to New Hampshire, grow in intensity in South Carolina and now we're next. Florida's Republican primary is at the end of the month, barely two weeks after SC and the ads (mostly from Romney and Romney's "totally uncoordinated" super-PAC) are increasing accordingly.

The super-PAC is mostly bashing Gingrich. There's a judo ad warning how Gingrich's negative attacks are beyond the pale and then proceeding to negatively attack Gingrich. The pro-Romney ad has him claiming he will determine the worth of a federal program by whether or not the Chinese are willing to finance it. Might it not make more sense to find out if the American people are willing to pay for it?

It's only going to get worse before the month is over. I see no recourse put to take refuge on the metaphorical roof of my local NPR station. And admire the orchids which continue to bloom. And the roses, which have started again. And the tomatoes which are ripening one by one in perfect sequence.