Category Archives: Home and Family

Thought for Food

October 23, 2011 Rebecca Nolen 2 Comments

Restaurants appear and disappear all around my neighborhood. What is it that attracts people to open up a restaurant in such a terrible economy?

I can think of several reasons why 0pening a restaurant might be like writing a novel. I’ve written a novel. I wonder if I could open a restaurant…

It takes a dream. I make lovely lasagna- people will flock. My book will sell and I will make millions.

It takes an idea – a menu or a story line.

It takes a lot of perseverance. The bank will love my proposal and give me a loan for this restaurant straight away. I will finish my novel even though I have no editor on the sidelines urging me forward.

It takes more perseverance. Okay, so the bank thinks I’m just one of millions with a lasagna recipe, I’ll go to another bank, or I’ll create more and even greater recipes. (You can see the analogy).

My husband and I try to visit the new restaurants at least once, and depend upon our daughter to try out the ones we can’t get to in time, before they close, I mean.

Why do they close? There are two reasons I believe restaurants are so quick to open and just as quick to close and only one of them has to do with the food. First, because the food was less than exceptional. In a world full of restaurants and people who eat at restaurants, the food must be beyond good. Secondly, a restaurant fails because of lack of business acuity. For instance, one recently closed restaurant handed out menus that had no English subtitles. I need to know what I’m ordering. Another is close to failing (despite wonderful food) because they added no sound-proofing along the walls and their patrons can not carry on a conversation below shouting level.

In the world of book writing a novel doesn’t get published for two reasons (And I’m being simplistic, I know.) First, because it isn’t well written. Secondly and more importantly, because the writer doesn’t push forward and persevere with publication.

But there are restaurant that are extremely successful that serve mediocre and even BAD food. (You can see the analogy I’m making. I hope.)

At Baby Barnaby’s people line up for hours on weekend mornings to get in and get a bad breakfast. On my visit I ordered a simple dish and after a few bites, could not eat it. I didn’t say anything to the waiter because I don’t want my plate whisked away and redone with spit added. Nor did I mention this to others who planned to try the restaurant. Everyone is entitled to eat bad food. But the others I had in mind have stood in line and then reported the same experience. Yet, people line up. And now I’m warning you – don’t do it! Save your money! Stand in line at the Breakfast Club instead.

There are soooo many restaurant around us. You would think I’m fortunate. I live blocks from Midtown, which is the epicenter of Thai/Vietnamese restaurants in Houston. Every one that we’ve tried isn’t worth a second visit. There is an excellent Chinese restaurant on Buffalo Speedway and I-59 called Q’uin Dynasty (five stars from me, consistently good, too). There are four Greek/Mediterranean restaurants in walking distance from my home. Not a one of them serves anything decent except the gyros. That gets boring. There are four Mexican or Tex/Mex restaurants within a few square blocks. I can’t get excited about any of them. The neighbors gather every Friday night at the pink Mexican restaurant. I will point out that of all the Mexican restaurants the pink one is the best. I think the name is La Palisado – or something else that I can’t pronounce, so it remains “the pink one.”

We went to a cafe around the corner last week and I ordered the chicken salad stuffed avocado. How could I go wrong? I received a plate sprinkled with dry iceberg lettuce with brown edges, a halved avocado with skin intact. I would describe the chicken salad as boiled chicken mashed with mayonnaise. It had been squished into the center of the avocado. I would at least grind down that cooked chicken so it wasn’t stringy, and then I would add some flavor.

Even the doughnut shop on the corner, (how can you mess up a doughnut?) can’t compare to Dunkin’ Donuts. But their parking lot is crowded with cars.

It isn’t all bad. There are incredible restaurants nearby. Marks, Davino’s, The Chocolate Bar, Little Bigs, Indika’s, and that hole-in-the wall Cajun place behind the gas station to name only a few. There are others yet to be tried and I will report.

I could make a restaurant work. I am married to a man with a good head for numbers, I DO have some great recipes and my business plan is simple – if you feed people enough tasty food, they will be back.

No, I don’t think I will start that restaurant business any time soon (though that may change as the really great restaurants are becoming fewer and farther between. And I am hungry.)

For now, I will stick to writing more tasty novels.

How opening a restaurant is NOT like writing a novel:

If at first you don’t succeed it is much too expensive to open another restaurant.

Here is a recipe:

My Mom’s Shrimp Dip

1 8 oz. block of cream cheese (room temp)

1 cup mayonnaise (gotta be the real stuff)

1 teaspoon sugar

1/2 lemon, juiced

1 and 1/2 cup fresh shrimp* (cooked, peeled, chopped)

Combine.

Best eaten the next day.

*the secret to good boiled shrimp is this. Put the raw, unpeeled shrimp in rapidly boiling, seasoned water. Wait two minutes. Turn fire off. Let shrimp sit in seasoned water for fifteen minutes. My favorite seasoning is two tablespoons of liquid Zatarain’s Crab and Shrimp boil, and two tablespoons salt.

Home and Family

Passages

September 16, 2011 Rebecca Nolen 2 Comments

This week my mother fell for the fifth time since January. I couldn’t be reached by phone to rush across town to open her door, so emergency personnel broker her door down. She was fine after the firemen picked her up off the floor and sat her in her chair. Her blood sugar was very high and she had been dizzy.

I didn’t find any of this out until the next day when I checked my phone messages. I called her and she sounded a million miles away, very weak. She said she didn’t know why she fell. She felt fine now. I talked to her care-giver who told me that mom hadn’t been taking her medications in a timely manner. A doctor’s appointment was arranged.

Thank heavens for Facebook.

I messaged the doctor before the appointment to explain what had been going on. The doctor asked my mother during the visit what she wanted to do to feel safer? My mother and I had been discussing a nursing home where there is 24-hour care. She has cried and worried and resisted the idea before now. She hasn’t set foot in a nursing home since the 1970’s. Most nursing home facilities are very much improved from the 1970’s. The doctor asked her what would happen if she fell and broke a bone? After all, she does have severe osteoporosis. My mother shrugged. The doctor said, “I would feel more at peace if you were being taken care of all the time.”

No tears this time except from me.

My mother nodded, “Well I can’t cook anymore anyway. Can’t lift the pots!”

She can’t cook any longer. The one thing that she has always loved to do. She can’t do it. Never mind she can’t make it to the toilet, or can’t dress herself, or is falling when there is no one to pick her up, no – she can’t cook!

I knew she would find the marker that tipped the scales somewhere.

You see, I didn’t want to rush her this time. When my father passed away. I rushed her. I packed her up before he was in the grave and took her body (but not soul) out of her home and into mine. If she had been capable she would have kicked and screamed the entire trip. She was almost ready for the home at that moment, but I wanted to help her get strong, to have that last fling. So I -oh-so-politely encouraged her to do her own laundry, take out her own trash, do her own dishes, things my sainted father had been doing for her for twenty years and the reason for her condition.

She DID get stronger. She made her own bed, picked up after herself, called for pizza delivery. But she grizzled about my abruptly moving her out of her home and worse – taking her five bedroom ranch home and reducing everything to a garage full of boxes – within four months of my father’s passing. She was actively mourning losing her mate of sixty years AND her things. And I was responsible.

Eight months later, I found an independent living facility for seniors where there was security. Unlike her home out in the country where there had been several armed robberies and doors being kicked in. This time we moved her, she was more willing. She was ready to get away from me.

Within months of being there, she was truly happy. She blossomed in the camaraderie of fellow seniors, especially the ice-cream socials. She gained weight. She walked the halls. Her blood pressure was good. Her anger at me waned. She even told me one day that she was thankful for me. “If I hadn’t lived with you I wouldn’t love this place so much.”

I think she meant she was thankful.

So today I called her social worker. I called a nursing home my brother and I had chosen. There is a bed available. All systems go. This is tough though. I keep telling myself that she will love to get involved in all the activities and having her hair done at the on-site beauty salon.

My daughter is due to have her baby this week. We are thrilled. Baby CoraBelle will soon be here. Finally.

I know my mother wants to see the baby, especially precious as her birthday is this week. She’ll be 86.

My cup is full. I grab my schedule as I can. Isn’t it that our life’s portion is meted out by hours, minutes, seconds. These portions add up to become passages. We didn’t witness the beginning, we don’t know the end. Life is in the journey.

Home and Family

News and Billboards

August 7, 2011 Rebecca Nolen 3 Comments

Some of you may have seen this billboard around town.

You might not have recognized my mother with her hat and the goofy sun drawn around her face. How did this happen? My neighbor, a photographer, saw my mother one day and exclaimed to me later that my mother looked like the perfect old lady. She asked me if I thought she would like to be on a billboard.

I had heard once that there are only three reasons a “lady” would ever be in the paper – When she’s born, when she marries, and when she dies. However, my mother was astounded and credulous upon hearing that the neighbor wanted to take her picture for a billboard advertisement for the Houston Food Bank.

“The Food Bank? I’m not starving! Why me?”

I told her that she looked like a nice old lady and they needed a nice old lady.

I don’t know if that was the right thing to say or not.

She was all for it.

Then a few weeks later and completely unrelated, my daughter was eating in her university cafeteria when she was approached by a woman toting a camera who asked if my daughter wanted to be on a billboard that would be going up all around Houston advertising the university. My daughter couldn’t believe it but she posed and snap!

Here is the result –

They even added a little along her sides because she looked too skinny next to the young man sharing the billboard picture with her.

A few weeks later, I kid you not. I was walking Big Boy and a reporter with CBS asked me what I thought of all the political signs in front yards. Of course when you ask me anything I will have an opinion, even if I make it up on the spot. It just seemed surreal for our family to be all over the place.

I didn’t watch the news to see if I was on or not. But a year later when we were renovating the home we now live in, a reporter asked me if I wanted to be in the paper.

Why not?

Here is the result –

And then the second picture with the article.

Home and Family, Nature

Sampson is Found!

June 19, 2011 Rebecca Nolen 5 Comments

My son went hunting this past weekend with some college friends and his best bud, a pooch named Sampson. He had adopted him during his first year of college over seven years ago, my first grand-dog.

The boys arrived at their friends ranch land and unloaded their gear to the air-conditioned cabin. Samson was out of sight but my son didn’t worry. Sampson liked to explore. But after unpacking he went to look for him. His friends had already started practice shooting. Sampson didn’t come when called. His friends joined him in the search. They spent the day searching. Sampson had disappeared.

He was something like a cross between a long-haired dachshund and a Chinese crested, long and low to the ground with not much hair except on the top of his head and on his chin. He ran with his jaw held crooked and his tongue hanging out and he could not hold his licker when anyone visited. He was just about the cutest ugly dog in the world.

It seemed that Saturday was one of those days when the bad news just kept coming. First the call about my husband’s aunt death. Then the emergency techs at the other end of my mother’s “life-alert” system called. My mother had fallen and couldn’t get up, could I go to her? Yes, we got to her and let the firemen into her apartment. She was alert but unable to move from a kneeling position, that’s as far as she could get from flat on her back. She fell when she thought she was grabbing the door jamb but missed and kept going. She was fine and we helped her get supper and settle for the night. Then when I texted my son about the happenings he texted me that Sampson was lost.

Texas is experiencing the worst drought in recorded history. I don’t hold out much hope that Sampson survived for long in the heat. Of all the day’s bad news and events, I think the little puppy getting lost forever in the Texas heat hit me the hardest. I guess the not knowing what happened is the worst part.

When my son was tiny and he lost his cherished teddy bear I told him Teddy went to Australia for a long vacation. It helped. It hurts that I can’t make up even the simplest solution to where Sampson is.

Today, being two days after Samspon was lost, is a red-letter day! Sampson has been found in Ledbetter, TX!

Home and Family

A Hundred Days to Health – the update

June 15, 2011 Rebecca Nolen 3 Comments

A hundred days have come and gone. I started this crazy attempt at improving my health at the end of January and so much has happened in that short period of time. Here are the highlights – major house renovation and move, and found out I’m to be a grandmother – but not in that order. In fact, life hasn’t been orderly.

So many things have tried to side-track the health effort. As written I started out a 5’3″ female at 143 pounds and meds included those for thyroid, cholesterol, and diabetes – in other words, a round, middle-aged lady with thinning hair.

I am now at 126 pounds. I’m down one size. My cholesterol meds have been cut in half. Thyroid is fixing to be a thing of the past. Diabetes meds are up (drat!). I’m still 5’3″.

The down side: At this age as you lose weight the wrinkles begin to show. It’s true. However, I don’t think neck waddles are the bane of the middle-aged woman’s existence. No, I believe the worst part of growing older as a woman is the baggy knees. I no longer look hot in shorts. The book Raggedy Ann and the Camel with the Baggy Knees has more meaning.

I’m thrilled to report that at least two of my friends have set their own health goals by also joining the YMCA and committing to a work-out schedule. Whoo Hoo!!

D.I.Y. House and Home, Home and Family

I Have Lived With Houses

May 13, 2011 Rebecca Nolen 1 Comment

Houses home our best or worst memories.

For those who watch the home improvement shows. I’m running circles around Suzie’s House. Ha!

This past weekend was one which will not be soon forgotten, or repeated. I went to a writing conference at the same time the moving van pulled up to our sweet Victorian cottage to load everything up and move us to the Arts and Crafts home that we’ve been renovating since January. I’d been packing for weeks, and getting material ready for editor and agent review for weeks. And biting my nails. There’s nothing like piling stress on stress. Does wonders for the neck muscles.

Like the characters in my novels, every house renovation jets me into some kind of trouble which seems impossible to get out of. The deeper one digs, the more trouble one unearths.

Foundation work took over a week because the 1910 house was that settled. Plus, the double porches on three sides of the house had to be raised separately. When they raised the back porch, the bottom one fell apart. So it had to be rebuilt to support the top porch. In rebuilding it I had them enclose part of it to create a mud room. Success! Then it rained. Whoops, forgot to waterproof above the sheet rock.

When exposing the chimney flue on the inside (at the kitchen) the builder found that there was NO support beam for the upper floor where it was needed. No wonder the toilet leaked. The upstairs bathroom was caving into the kitchen. I went to flush the toilet the day I didn’t know the sewer line was frozen and the black water shot out, splattered past me and into the tub. Yuck!

Now all toilets flush.

That is huge.

The only thing left is having the air conditioning, the electric and the plumbing pass inspection. Oh, and adding knobs to a few doors.

When we bought the Victorian cottage there was a pot-holed drive way and several street people sleeping under the house or in the shed. We paved the drive, tore up the none-existent sidewalks, and added a fence around the property. The house itself was not livable as the air-conditioning had irreparably broken, which we didn’t know until after we purchased the property. It had limped along until somewhere between signing on the dotted line and getting home warranty insurance.

The Victorian is perfect now. Ready for some fortunate person to purchase it and move in.

The house I grew up in was asbestos shingled, with a white rock roof. No one knew about asbestos then, just knew asbestos made it fire-proof. The shingles were painted daffodil yellow. I remember feeling proud that my house could be seen from a great distance.

Ha. Ha. A huge distance. That house was day-glow before day-glow existed.

There was a crack in the foundation. It was so wide you could see daylight. My brother and I would sit and wait for lizards to crawl in and capture them. To this day I’m crazed if a Palmetto bug skitters too near my feet. This is because for a period of time, after my parents built their bedroom and gave me their old room, I would go to my bed and flip the covers back. There was a Palmetto bug sitting there, waiting for me. It happened again and again. Go in, flip covers, Palmetto bug, scream. Palmetto bugs look like giant cockroaches. I am still afraid.

My grandmother’s house I remember with fondness. I spent a great deal of childhood with my grandmother. There was a painted wood staircase that led to an apartment upstairs. Instead of closet doors there were heavy velvet curtains. My cousins and I would put on plays. I discovered an easy-bake oven one day and burned my fingers.

That house was built in 1889. It didn’t survive Hurricane Carla in 1961. Termites had undermined the beams beneath it and the wind blew it sideways and it crumbled.

My husband and I bought our first house in 1987. It was one of thirty homes out in the middle of a field and across the highway from one of Texas’s finest prison farms. Unwittingly the phone wiring wasn’t sophisticated enough for the phones and so we all shared a party line. This neighborhood wasn’t Mayberry. You could pick up the phone any time day or night and someone would be carrying on a conversation. These people would get abusive when asked to give up some phone time. The first day my oldest went to Kindergarten, the police were searching cars as we left the subdivision. I thought it was a drug raid. As I pulled up the policeman shone his flashlight in my face, like they do on TV. I asked him what was going on. A prisoner had escaped and was seen crossing the highway and slipping over a fence. Shaken I took my son on to school and rushed home to make sure all the doors and windows were locked.

Turned out the prisoner had broken an ankle slipping over the fence and that yard was surrounded by big dogs so he had no where to go. That was two blocks from my house.

Time passed. We raised two kids. The area sprouted five thousand houses.

The p-farm sold to a developer.

We moved farther into the country, where we lived on the edge of a creek. And dealt with banana spiders the size of your hand, water moccasins, and gorgeous sunsets. I miss that house.

We moved downtown beneath the big city skyline to an ultra modern townhouse with a chef-designed kitchen. TOO many stairs in that place. Two weeks after we moved in, Hurricane Ike swept past not a mile from us. The big trees in the neighborhood were uprooted and left higglety-pigglety in the streets.

Felt like renovating a hundred year old house, found one, fixed it and moved in. In this house I learned that street people are important to get to know. There are good ones and bad ones. I got to know Reggie, The Razor, Robinson (former boxer), Cash (a former pimp), Bear (he always wears a clean white shirt, a tie, and a smile, and Reno (don’t trust Reno). I learned that if you pay attention, these are the people who either make your neighborhood safe or make it horrible. Street people know what is going on. They keep watch. They know when a car should or shouldn’t be where it is, etc.

Two years later, meaning now, my husband and I found another hundred-year-old house that needed love. We fixed it (mostly) and moved in.

What have I learned?

First, I don’t think I’ll ever move house on the same day as a conference again. That was silly.

Secondly, making alleys through the boxes isn’t such a terrible thing.

Home and Family

To Suffer the Slings and Arrows

April 27, 2011 Rebecca Nolen Leave a comment

Recently I was asked to attend the execution of a turkey.

They are my brother’s turkeys. Or perhaps I should say – they are my brother’s dinners. He has several animals on his farm. He raises AKC Siberian Huskies. He has a pet goat (B-Black). He has a sheep. (That feels awkward to think of a single sheep as a sheep.) He has a pet chicken (Miss Chick-chick). He has several other chickens slated to be dinners at some point. (Miss Chick-chick is safe.) He has ducks. He plans to get several sheep and raise little muttons, I mean lambs.

He says of all the animals he has there is nothing dumber than a turkey. Apparently, the turkeys are dumber than the chickens. Doesn’t that say it all? I mean, when you think of a pea-brain, think chicken.

When I mentioned the death of the turkey at a dinner party a few days later, (I did not go into graphic detail. I remembered my manners in the nick of time.) my friend mentioned that she’d been reading a book that speaks about how we should all be like turkeys. The book was about the known unknowable and the unknown unknowable. The fact that for 365 days or more the turkey wakes up with the sun shining and the feeder person coming with the feed. Happy. Then one day the feeder person comes, grabs the turkey up and bam! The end. The turkey never saw it coming.

We all know we can’t KNOW what will happen in the next second, or day, or week, etc. Thus, the known unknowable. But no one actually expects the turkey feeder man to grab one up and bam!

No one sees that coming. No one.

We all expect to die at some point. We don’t plan death necessarily but we know it is inevitable. It is the knowable unknown. Then there is the unknowable unknown. Take what happened to my father for example. His parents lived into their eighties and nineties and died of heart related deaths. We all expected my father to keep on ticking along. I noticed he wasn’t his usually upbeat self around October. At Thanksgiving he wasn’t eating well, which was huge. He loved to eat. The day I took him to a doctor’s appointment a few days after Thanksgiving, I really took a good look at him. The whites of his eyes were yellow. That day the doctors were almost a hundred percent sure that he had pancreatic cancer. The diagnosis was confirmed with an MRI. He died twenty-one days later. No one in the family had ever had cancer. Bam!

I went to visit my friend Shirley today. She has mesothelioma. She has never knowingly been around asbestos. She has always been a very careful person about her own health. This was a shocking diagnosis. When diagnosed, the doctors gave her seven weeks. It has been six months. We continue to pray that she remains as upbeat as she is. Even in this terrible time of her life, visiting her is an uplifting experience. She is an example of a person who has lived under God’s umbrella of love and protection. She is assured that death is not a frightening thing. When I’m around her she is more likely to be concerned about what is going on in my life than worrying with what is going on in hers. That is amazing.

She is happy.

Hers isn’t a happiness that the book is referencing. She isn’t a turkey. She is all too aware of what will happen to her. She isn’t living in La-La land thinking she will be miraculously healed, although it isn’t out of the range of possibility. It would be a miracle if the cancer disappears. She has gone through the mourning process. All the stages of grief. At first she denied the possibility of mesothelioma – telling her doctors they had made a mistake. Then later, she was angry. Later still, she cried.

Now, the only time she cries is when she wonders how her husband of fifty years will do without her. He can barely boil an egg.

For now, she is teaching him to cook.

Home and Family

My Biggest Boy

April 6, 2011 Rebecca Nolen 1 Comment

A few years ago I would have fallen into the “cat person” category. My children would often remind me that if it hadn’t been for the fact that “Daddy” was allergic to them I would probably have ended up on the animal planet’s “Hoarders” series. The crazy cat lady, uh… yes, that would be me. As it is, with allergic husband and all – we have three.

Growing up with three brothers my family always had variety of species dwelling on the property: in garbage cans (hognose snakes – and boy, was mother shocked when she went to throw the trash in), in cans (toads for the hognose snakes to eat), in jars (lightning bugs don’t live long in jars – in case you wondered), in hutches (about 48 hamsters at a time), in the dog house (between 7 and 13 cats at a time – they took over the dog’s house), in the pond (goldfish until the catfish ate them, but that’s another post), in homemade cages (for the praying mantis or surviving caught mice), in aquariums (about 10 of them for the budding tropical fishery), and on the side porch(dogs – usually three at a time).

Don’t think I wasn’t in the middle of all of it. I handle snakes. Have a snake question? Ask me. Insects? Expert. I adore frogs – the cool green ones. Not so fond of toads. In my mind the jury is still out on whether those bumps give you warts. AND when you pick up a toad it PEES on you! And its pee probably gives you warts also.

I suppose you can tell I had a problem with warts as a kid.

I was always involved with the animals. We grew up out in the country. Apart from my brothers, I wasn’t allowed friends at my house so the animals were my companions. I would even sneak out at night to sleep in the dog house with the cats. Warm kittens curled up and purring on your chest – there’s nothing like it. Is that weird? Probably.

But dogs? Couldn’t stand them. My brothers loved them. My brothers smelled like the dogs, i.e. don’t like either of them. (Okay – for the record, I love my brothers now, but this was then and now is now.)

I grew up and discovered I liked boys. I even married one. Although he is allergic to cats and initially I gave up a cat to marry my husband. He has been suffering ever since because we have cats. Heh. Heh. Though it is my theory that if you live with an animal long enough you become immune to that animal. There is scientific evidence to back this up. Apparently the cat’s saliva is particular to the cat and humans can build up a resistance. This proves my husband’s undying love as he has put up with and grown immune to our many fuzzy felines for all these thirty years.

Baby number one was a boy. I don’t know why it is that there’s this floating cultural idea that boys need a dog but I believed that my son needed a dog. We went to the shelter and the first puppy I saw was too adorable to turn down. Part German Shepherd and part Lhasa-Apse (I don’t know how either), Grover looked like Benji, but turned out to be the dog from hell. He tore off the siding of the house, the tile from the bathroom floor, ate through a storm door, and made life-changing messes on the carpet. I had him very well-trained. Only he was so smart he would watch to see when I wasn’t looking.

We gave him to a good home.

Years later one of our beloved cats went missing. I visited all the pounds. No Ajax. But, I phoned my husband, “Hey! I found a chihuahua that looks just like the cat.” “NO DOGS!” said my husband. I went home and pouted and whined. Poor puppy. Poor, poor little puppy – in that cold, cruel pound. “OKAY!” said my husband. “BUT IT WILL BE YOUR RESPONSIBILITY!”

Fourteen years later we had to put that precious pound puppy down and it was horrible. Yes, Skittles was the husband’s lap puppy for all those years.

Our wonderful Big Boy is a delight. All 80 pounds of him. Yes, the shelter people said he wouldn’t get any larger than 45 pounds. They lied! I could tell from his baby photos that his hooves declared him to be a future monster. We live in a big city. And he has a monster-dog bark.

I’m so glad we have him.

Last night was a little on the coolish side. Big Boy was shoved up against me in the bed, a snoring heater of a dog. Warm dogs smell like a combination of warm buttered popcorn and canned peas, have you ever noticed?

It’s the best scent in the world.

Home and Family

Expected Changes

April 3, 2011 Rebecca Nolen 1 Comment

My blog posts haven’t been regular with all the major changes going on in our family. We expect to move from our one hundred year old Victorian cottage to our newest project – a one hundred year old Arts and Crafts house that we’ve been renovating.

My art room is overrun with boxes of light fixtures.

Sometimes things don’t go as expected. Sure there are some bumps in the road to a renovated house. For instance, the builder installed the kitchen sink under a window as planned but off-center, which was not planned. The entire cabinet layout had to be ripped out and re-installed to get it right. There are unfinished projects in the cottage where we live. I switched out an outdated bathroom sink and installed a pedestal sink. Perfect! Then painted the bathroom yellow. Not so perfect! With the new light fixtures installed the yellow hurts my eyes. Thankfully it is just paint. Unlike the new drawer pulls in the new old house kitchen which are not placed correctly. This is something that can not be changed without replacing drawer fronts. And replacing drawer fronts mean re-ordering and re-ordering means delays in the work schedule and delays here mean delays in the move-in date. And on and on.

When my daughter graduated from university and then got a job in her field (science) we were very happy for her. And three weeks later she tearfully told us that she was expecting. Her boyfriend told her he had things to do for himself. When pressed for details he texted her that he “wanted out”.

What a jerk.

So moving away from home and getting an apartment with a girlfriend isn’t exactly an option. So we will adapt. We will make room, we will rearrange and celebrate this new expectation.

I’m going to be a grandmother.

That’s an excellent thing.

Home and Family

Mothers and Daughters and Daughters or Sons

March 16, 2011 Rebecca Nolen 1 Comment

I sat across from her hospital bed as she pushed her food around on her plate. I waited. This was some sort of ticking bomb situation here. And I wasn’t about to be the one to light it this time.

“There isn’t enough salt,” she said.

I said, “Aren’t you on a low-sodium diet?”

“Yes. But I’m supposed to be on a low-sodium and diabetic diet.”

I thought – well that explains everything, but I said, “that means less salt and less sugar, right?”

She pursed her lips like she does when she doesn’t want to talk about something. She pulled out a plastic baggie from a stack of baggies that I thought were designed to hold all her meds. This bag was full of salt packets, the kind you get at McDonald’s. She ripped them open one by one and dumped the contents on her food.

My children and husband watched this and then looked at me. I didn’t know what to say. She must have noticed. She took a bit at the tip of her spoon and shook her head. “Still isn’t enough flavor.” And then she pulled packets of sugar substitute and emptied them on her food.

“Mom”, I said, “that’s sugar substitute. It’s sweet”.

“I know. It helps”.

I asked her what her sugar was. She said – two sixty-five.

“Not so good, huh?”

She shrugged. She pushed the food around and then pulled the two bowls of fruit closer. “I tried to be zealous about my diabetes when they first discovered it. When my weight went down the doctors didn’t seem too concerned, so I thought worrying about it was stupid.”

“Mom, that was 1964. There are better medications these days.”

My husband leaned over and whispered, “You shouldn’t preach.”

That was several years ago. Today, as I watched my eighty-five year old mother getting her nails done I thought, despite all the prickly feelings between us all these years, she was the best mother she knew how to be. I wonder what my daughter will think of me when I’m eighty-five.

I wonder if I will get to be eighty-five.

My mother has survived terrible ups and downs with her blood-sugar, hundreds of mini-strokes and one major stroke. These days she gathers twelve to fifteen books from the library every three weeks and proceeds to read them, preferring like me to read her way through authors. She gets a hair permanent and her nails done at the salon every four months. She looks pretty darn good.

These feelings well up and I want to tell her what I’m thinking. Before I can she reaches out and pats my hand and tells me that she’s proud of me. And I wish I can take back all those times I was so smart. When I wasn’t.

Today was the day I told my mother that she would be a great-grandmother. Her eyes grew wide and she smiled and said, “I don’t know how I feel about that. I never thought I’d see the day.”

Yes, I know.