Showing posts with label memories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memories. Show all posts

Sunday, June 03, 2007

Miscellany

I am working on gathering paperwork for the estate receipts/disbursements stuff to take to the lawyer, per his request. It is amazing how panicked this makes me feel. I have been wailing again that I want my parents back, when I had been going along with more okay moments than upset moments for so long. Of course, one item is not yet anywhere I've searched, which is also upsetting me but in a different way. (Not too bad - I can call the bank and get the info from them, I am just annoyed that I can't find it, but it may be in the one area I still need to go through.)

My to-do list has just kept getting larger and more frantic since December, and I'm ready to cry and scream. Unfortunately at the moment I don't have a whole lot of leeway time to do so.

On a brighter note, I am enjoying swapping with people on swap-bot for the most part. It is interesting to see what you get although sometimes I am a bit bemused. (So far, the winner is the person who sent me a postcard with a quote on it. I'm in, like, three or four swaps for postcards. This is a handmade postcard - it is gorgeous. And nowhere on it did the person identify either themselves, or which swap it is for.)

Also on the positive side, an old friend from high school told me that my mother had given her mother some of the pinks I loved as a child. And they still survive at their house! So I can find out what my pinks are after all and, even better, they are going to divide them and give me some. Since they spread by root and division, this really feels like getting some of the pinks from my parents' house back after all.

Thursday, December 07, 2006

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.