Transitions

[mellicious]

The begonia that I brought home from Mom's house is blooming, no less. I don't know if it'll survive the winter - but actually, I suppose it must've survived last winter since it's been longer than that since anyone did anything but water the plants over there.

I divided the plants I had between the front porch (very shady) and the back patio (partial shade) more or less at random, but everything is hanging in there so far. I wasn't sure how anything would do. The porch in the old apartment got a lot more sun. We've had pretty good weather lately so I'm sure that helps.

I felt very tired and blah today and I decided we should just stay home. I have already had a meeting with the lawyer this week so I felt like I had already done my duty as an executrix for the week, anyway. I gave the lawyer the new papers that I found on the house and they should be able to finally file the inventory now. And other than that, we are mostly just waiting on the house to sell, which hopefully will happen in the spring. We should be able to get started with the renovating after the holidays, I think.

Rob & I have been going out to eat on Saturdays all year, on the way up to Mom's - actually, that's an older custom than that, since Mom and I went out to lunch on Saturdays for years and years, and kept doing it right up until she was hospitalized and couldn't go any more. So we went out to lunch today, too, even though we weren't going anywhere else. The habit seems to be kind of ingrained now. Eventually we won't have to go to Mom's on Saturdays any more, but I bet we keep going out to lunch! Not a bad habit to have, really.

I was thinking about how this year was different from the past several years. We haven't had a Christmas where a family member wasn't seriously ill in a long time - the last three years it was Mom - I guess it was coincidence that she always got sicker this time of year, but she definitely did; and somewhere in there my great-aunt Rae was very ill at Christmas also, I guess that was two years ago; and there was another year that that my mom was having chemo in December for her first round of cancer, before that, in 2001 (I remember saying, "Oh, this has just been a crap year all around" - little did I know); and a couple of years before that my uncle Ted was in the hospital at Christmas and he died right afterwards. Actually I think my dad had chemo in December a few years ago for his prostate, too, but that was after Mom had already gotten sick, and poor Daddy and his prostate got really short shrift. (I barely blinked when he told me. I was like, "Cancer? Oh ok... but the prognosis is good? OK, good, you'll be fine, then. Bye!") So I don't quite know what to do with a "normal" Christmas.

So in the interest of normalcy, we put up tree #2 today - this is less impressive than it sounds since they are both really small trees. The second tree is the all-white one, and I put a bunch of my mom's stuff on it. It's gold, silver and pink, and it looks really pretty. It's completely different-looking than the other tree, which (as you may recall) is a green tree with multi-color lights and decorations. I will have to try to get a picture of the second tree but I don't have a good track record on getting tree pictures that do them justice. With the lights and everything, it makes it hard.

I feel like there should be some lesson to all of this but I don't know what it is. My life is just in transition, that's all. I should probably get used to it.





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