Friends are a good thing.

This past weekend, we flew to Denver and spent the weekend with friends from college (members of a club my husband and I were both in), and some people from the same group that we did not know. It felt like coming back to family and dear friends, even the strangers. It was excellent recharging time, and - forgive me, Mom and Dad - not associated with memories of my parents. I treasure those memories, but in this space I wasn't thinking about what I have lost, but about what I still have.

I have been blessed so many ways. And I still am, in many of those same ways.

That includes some of you, who read and who think of me, and who leave a comment here.

Some days, I could just cry.

And these are them. There is too much going on. I have made three trips this summer, and make three more in the next two months (though only two, both over, were longer than 4 days, and only one of those was over a week). Work has been busy - in a good way, but busy.

A year ago this week, my mother went into the hospital with what they thought at first was just malnutrition and weakness. It would take them months to diagnose terminal lung cancer, it would be almost four months before she was dead. Not long enough. Not nearly long enough. And I wish she had lasted a week longer, because then the road would not have been icy when Dad drove to the lawyer. (Oh, let's be honest: I wish she would have never gotten ill, and lived to be in her nineties. But that doesn't somehow seem as realistic as wishing for an extra week. Silly realism. Not like any of it is realistic now knowing what I know today, namely, what did happen.)

A year ago this week. My emotions have been on a rollercoaster. To add to that, I got the letter today; the estate is closed out. I write two more checks and the whole proceedings are completed - legally. I still have a lot of stuff to sort through, dispose of (sell, donate, etc.), and so on. What's neat on paper is not necessarily neat and tidy in any other way.

I do not expect the months between now and January to be easy. And this coming weekend is another of my trips, to get together with college buddies from ten years ago and hang out and play games (myself and my husband both). And it seems strange to ping pong like this between the trivial but sweet and the other.

We had to have Basta put down. (Heart disease caught up with her, despite attempts to treat her. She would have died that day, it was just a question of whether it would be quick and peaceful or not.) But we still have Babe, and she regularly puts holes in my leg climbing into my lap. I still remember her jumping to Dad's lap, when he sat on the little computer chair by the foot of Mom's hospital bed. Even with his heavy jeans on, he would quickly grab for her and look pained - a heavy, clumsy cat with a lot of pointy pieces. She still is. And I understand why they loved her so. She is a charming sweetheart with those she knows and trusts. A cuddly little sweetheart with a joy for life that is so touching.

And sometimes, rather soggy fur. She's fairly patient with me all things considered.

I wish she were home - home with my parents, home where she was born, with them still taking care of her. I'd never know this side of her, for I was Stranger then and she was cautious with me. But I'd have my parents. On the other hand, since I don't have my parents, I'm rather glad to have her to cuddle.

I want to go back five years, ten years, and do all this again, treasure my parents and our time together more dearly, ask the questions I wonder about now when they can still be answered. (For example, where did my sister's baby book end up? I want it, but I cannot find it. I don't know why I care - she was born and died eight years before I came along - and I have baby photos of her. Just not the book. But I do care.)

If I could go back, of course, the first thing I would do is try to change things, not get those answers I get maudlin about now.

Perhaps we're lucky humanity hasn't got a time machine. What a horrible temptation it would be - or, if nothing could be changed, what a torture.

I'm going to have enough on my plate, just living through these next four months, I think.

Meh.

Truth be told I am not feeling very creative. I am feeling tired and whiny and overwhelmed. The vacation was excellent and I had a great time. But I came home to a huge to-do list that seems to grow longer by the day. Argh! I'm getting my to-do list shorter at work but that's it. :(

On the other hand, my father-in-law gave me the most basic bread machine recipe I've ever met, and it actually works right, which is more than I can say for some of the box mixes I've met. I could learn to like the bread machine. Especially since my husband will clean it after it's run.

Neither of us likes to do dishes much, so not nearly as much gets cooked here as it might. There's so much TIME in food preparation and cleanup. Ugh!

Home again, home again. Or, long time no post.

And this is not much of a post. I am back (okay, have been back a couple days) from a two-week vacation spent visiting my relatives. Mom's side of the family, and also my husband's family. They are all out in the Midwest. I wonder what I would have been like if my parents had lived near enough that I was raised with the constant interconnectedness to family that they were? As it is, it's a sweet but foreign land to me. But the visit was lovely.

I don't really have much to say. I had a blast - and now I am home - and I am missing my parents starkly and wishing I could share some of the things I saw and heard and did with them. And I am running in circles catching up on all the things that lagged while I was gone. Ack!

I have photos, but they are not up yet.

Memories

These are mostly memories of me, not my mother - or my mother in the context of me. I am trying to write up some others, but of course our views of those in our lives so often center around their interactions with us. In this case I was actually writing up memories of myself, but they also touch on her. I link to where I wrote them up in my LiveJournal, years back:

When I was little and other stories.

I'll add a couple more that are not there, more Mother-centric or at least parents-centric:

1) When I was young, we had a dog named Meyer. Meyer was a Doberman-Great Dane cross. As you might imagine, he was a huge and very leggy dog.

Meyer slept on my parents' bed. My parents, very logically, had a king-size bed at the time, as otherwise it would not have been possible to fit two adults and a dog on that thing! Meyer tended to crawl up into the middle. And then streeeeeeetch. A dog that size can, in fact, occupy most of a king-size bed if he wants to. My mother, with the same slender light build I have, never budged. My father, probably half again her weight and sturdy, sometimes got shoved out of the bed, however. (Mother has generally been a light sleeper - I suspect she was half-waking and bracing without remembering it, but no idea if this is actually the case.)

2) Sweety. The first cat that was 'mine' growing up was a tomcat (fixed) that I named Sweety. (Mom thought I was crazy when I gave him that name as a kitten - he was a tomcat, and she tried to explain to me he wasn't likely to live up to it. I insisted. He lived up to it. In later years, among other things, I found him baby-sitting two litters of kittens that their mothers had left with him while they went to hunt. And letting the kittens try to suckle on him, without protest. Not that it was doing them any good, of course!)

Mom, when I was younger, curled her hair. (Not sure if it was sometimes or always.) I don't remember Mom with her hair curled. I remember the curlers, the old kind with the spiky points, rolled in wet hair and left in overnight. The sort to make you want to sleep on your face so they wouldn't press in so much. And I remember that Sweety caused my parents' bedroom door to be closed when the curlers were in (and ultimately, I think, led to Mom switching how she did her hair - not 100% sure as my childhood memories are weakish)...because he liked to sleep on her pillow. Above her head, which he slid down into. All 14 or 16 pounds of him (he was a heavy cat).

...that hurts just to think about, actually.

3) I don't remember this one at all, but Mother has told me this. I forgot the dog's name but I believe they said today that it was Twitch. Mom remembers this dog "chasing" a naked baby me around a coffee table...at a slow walking pace...and whenever I would lag, he would stick his cold wet nose on my backside, spurring me on! Apparently we were quite amusing.