Grandma's Bed

The night my mom and my niece arrived in New York from Jamaica, my niece slept over with her grandmother. The next morning, my daughter was at their door bright and early. My mom was already up and having breakfast as my daughter climbed into bed with her cousin to begin an epic session of catching up. My mom and I sat at the dining table of her little studio, watching the girls happily. They are sisters, these two, sole citizens of a magical world known inside our family as Abbe and Notta land.


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Old Wall

This wall on Tiemann Place in New York City makes me think prehistoric cave paintings should adorn its surface. It feels so ancient and out of time. I'm uploading photographs from the past few weeks this morning, a nifty escape from the demands of work. I have a lot of catching up posts to do, but perhaps all I will be able to manage is to put up photographs and let them speak. Do you see the woman dancing, her skirts swirling flamenco-like, at the center of this wall? Do you see the hint of water flowing down in the faint splashes of light?


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How lucky can you get?

A restaurant in Rye, New York, after Hurricane Irene passed through.

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Hallelujahs

We were spared. No flooding. Just one spot near our dining table where water seeped under the floorboards, almost dry already. My mom's apartment was pristine, and the worst thing we faced when we opened the doors of our apartment was the smell of my daughter's soccer cleats, which she had just dumped in the center of her room, leaving them to bake in the damp humid hermetically sealed house all weekend. If you know soccer players, you know the odor that greeted us. Now the house reeks of Febreze, the fans are stirring up the air, and oh, it is good to be back safe and sound. Best of all, my girl is home from all her summer adventures. Gosh, we miss her silly self when she is gone!

I have so much work, people. And another tax audit coming up—once they find you, they freakin stalk you! But after our last audit in March, I'm calm as can be. No more terror of the unknown. I will be here, possibly blogging a little less than usual, surrounded by papers and receipts, trying to find financial equilibrium and keep the old folks accompanied and cared for. Unless I decide to upload pics from this weekend instead! Either way, please bear with me if I'm commenting a little less. I will still be visiting and reading and loving you madly. Oh yes, I will.

After the Storm

Just a quick post from upstate, in between college shopping trips and unpacking storage units and carting boxes and plastic bins up stairs and setting up new rooms for one college junior and one college senior:

Well, my mom and my aunt weathered the storm with no leaks and no power outages, though my mom spent the night awake and terrified by banging, crashing sounds and howling winds and the blinds swinging from side to side so that she kept trying to find where the wind was coming in and disturbing them so. I told her it was the entire upper part of the building that was swaying in the wind; my aunt lives on the eighteenth floor.

Many apartments in our complex got flooded, but not my aunt's. We don't yet know the condition of our apartment and won't be any wiser until we return home tomorrow. The repointing of the brick facades that has been going on for the past two years didn't help matters. I also have no idea how my mom's apartment came through, as she hasn't yet been back to it. She's spent most of today dozing in the armchair next to my aunt's hospital bed, catching up on the sleep she didn't get last night.

Imagine: My mother spent the entire year until this month in the Caribbean, and a week after she gets to New York, she is having to contend with a full-fledged hurricane. The world feels upside down. At least Irene deflated to a tropical storm as soon as she came ashore at Coney Island and she speeded up, too, so that the storm had moved past the city by 10 a.m, even though it was supposed to sit over the city until 2 a.m. tonight. My husband says Irene got to New York and gave up the ghost. One headline screeched, "Irene Fails to Wow the City." Seriously? I am just so relieved things went as they did. And if there is no flooding to deal with in my mom's apartment or ours, I will sing hallelujahs.

And to my friends here, thank you for thinking of us as the storm approached, and sending the good thoughts. I think they helped! All those thoughts weaving a safety net over the city. Who was it who said, Thoughts are things?

Irene

This hurricane Irene is giving me major agita. We are supposed to drive our niece up to college tomorrow along with her stuff, and the rest of our son's stuff, which he packed in our car before he left this morning. He traveled up by bus as he has an appointment with his advisor. He's changing majors from to pre med, but the real truth of it is, his friends have been texting him all week asking when he'll be back to help get the party started. Sunday we are supposed to take both kids shopping for the household stuff they still need, since they are both be moving into apartments and will be cooking for themselves this year. Then we drive back Monday.

My daughter has been at her soccer preseason camp at a boarding school upstate all week. She was so torn. She loves playing soccer and being on the team, but she was really ready to just be home with everyone after her summer away at camp. The team was supposed to return tomorrow night. As we were supposed to be gone by then, the plan was that she would take the subway home, get my mom, bring her to our apartment, and look out for her until we return on Monday. When I asked her to bring her grandma over to stay with her for the weekend, she said, "Mom, I'm 17. Does Grandma really need to babysit me?" "No," I said. "You need to grannysit her." My mom enjoyed that one.

But then Irene whipped up her high wind souffle. Darn. How do I leave my 89-year-old mother and 17-year-old daughter alone in a hurricane? They say it's a fierce one, too, a Category 3 with the eye of the storm passing right up Fifth Avenue. They're giving warnings about projectiles hitting windows. They say if the windows start to shake, retreat at once to the public hallways. The supermarkets are jam packed this morning as people try to lay in supplies.

At just before noon, our daughter's soccer coach emailed to say they're trying to get buses to bring the girls home today. But the bus company is besieged with such requests, so the team may still not leave till tomorrow morning. Subways, buses and bridges will all be closed down at noon tomorrow. So I really hope the soccer girls manage to get buses home today. And now the other questions. Do we wait and drive upstate Monday, riding out the storm in the city and delivering our niece late to school? Do we take my daughter and mother with us, since the town we're heading to will be north and east of Irene's predicted path?

It's now 6 p.m. My girl and the rest of the team are on a bus heading home. The new plan is my mom is going to stay with Aunt Winnie during the storm and our daughter will travel upstate with us. My aunt's home attendant will be there to assist my mom with meals and baths, and my mom will be good company for her, as my aunt doesn't talk anymore; she is in a sort of waking coma, declining visibly every day. My mom says she does not feel up to a 5-hour road trip so I have spent today laying in supplies for her and my aunt, including non perishables in case power goes out. And my husband has taped up seams around the windows and put fresh batteries in the flashlights, placing one next to my mom's bed, one next to her chair, and one on the kitchen table.

I'm so weak-kneed grateful to my aunt's home attendant. I feel terribly guilty leaving my mom, but she insists they will be fine, that we should go ahead and get the kids set up for school before classes start next week. And of course I want to do that, I take comfort in getting them well settled in for the year, making sure they have what they need. They don't really need me to do all that. It's me who needs that transition, that incremental goodbye, see you later, have a good year.

So we are leaving early on Saturday morning as planned. And I am hoping that Irene will be but a whimper by the time she reaches the city, that all this frantic preparation will be met with a fizzzle of rain, nothing more. My mother says serenely, "God will be with us." As I secretly do when she says this, I wonder about all the people who might not come through okay, and I wonder if God is with them too. I have no answers. I'm just grateful she isn't afraid.

Shenanigans

My son has been home since Sunday. He leaves again tomorrow, headed back to college. I had forgotten the simple pleasure of just seeing him around, even if he's too busy with his friends to sit and shoot the breeze much with his parents. It's just nice to see him coming and going, fully engaged in his life. Mostly, he seems happy. That's all we ever want for them, isn't it? Everything we desire for them is in service of happy, even the challenging times that help them appreciate what's good.

25 Years

Twenty-five years ago, my love and I pledged to have and to hold, easily the best decision of my life. Precious and good things ensued, most especially our children. That was us in photographs taken at the passport office the week before we were married. Love of my life, here's to the next 25 with you! Amen.

The resolution isn't so great, but since I haven't yet had a moment to scan anything, I'm posting this image that my husband has on his iPhone and emailed to me.

Glow

We picked up my mom and my niece from the airport in the early hours of Sunday morning, and my mom walked into her treehouse studio when the dawn was just beginning to put the night on notice. I had put in flowers and left on soft lights, so the apartment would look glowing and welcoming. My mom went straight to her favorite chair and she sat there, looking around, noting everything as she left it. And she said, "Well isn't this something. I am here."

The Summer Before

I took these photographs of my family while we were visiting my mom in St. Lucia in August 2001. It was less than a month before 9/11 knocked us into a parallel reality, making these photographs seem especially poignant to me. My son was nine and my daughter was seven and their dad, who they liked to call Papa Bear, was a convenient pop prop as I snapped these pictures. He was in conversation across the table. I love the easy way my son is leaning into his dad but there is something solemn in my daughter's eyes. Truth is, she wore this expression a lot as a young child, which is such a counterpoint to her often laughing dancing countenance now. The year before I took this, she had drawn a picture of the Twin Towers being struck by lightening storms and she wrote an accompanying story about the towers falling over. She had a friend from whose roof she could see the towers clearly, and was always drawing pictures of them that year. Months after the planes hit, she told me she had dreamed the big fire, but she thought it would happen much later, when she was a teenager. I have the picture she drew. I plan to scan and post it in observance of the tenth anniversary of the tragedy, as a remembrance and a wish that my children, and all of us, will reshape the temper of our planet in the next ten years.