Autumnal ambivalence

Autumn.
I both love it and hate it.
Autumn plucks at my heartstrings.
I have always felt a sadness, and yet it is a time of year I like best.
Heat dissipates, and we have lovely cool days, and gorgeous tree colors.

As far back as I can remember.... it makes me melancholy.
My earliest recollection, age 3 perhaps.... someone (a woman) singing

Try To Remember (Jerry Orbach)

and my heart hurt.  It made me cry, it made me sad.
It caused me feelings I could not understand at a tender age.
It makes me wonder if it was a premonition of a sad September in my future....
I won't explain that here.

Fall always makes me happy and sad.
A wistful longing for something,
Something that has been lost,
a place I can never return to because it no longer exists...
Perhaps a place i have not yet been....

20180907

Autumn.
I both love it and hate it.
It plucks at my heartstrings.

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summer memories

Summer Days

Hot summer days.
Sunny summer heat.
Riding bicycles to baskin robbins.

Riding bicycles around and around.
Not really going anyplace.
An escape from parents.

Sneaking cigarettes in the school yard.
Talking to boys in the field behind the school.
Laughing, movies, sesame street....

Robert Redford movies,
A trip to the farm.
Road trips....

Home,
riding the bicycle...
home.

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'skeeters --damn bugs!

Presently we are experiencing an unusual outbreak of large, voracious, menacing mosquitoes in northern Illinois.... and that reminded me.......

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During my seventh year we had a fish tank.  This was during the time we lived in the Cape Cod house.... the fish were in a small tank on a little side table in the dining room.  This fish tank was your basic glass fish bowl, no aerator, nothing fancy.... gold fish, little ones.

It should not surprise anyone to know that I still have this particular fish bowl....but I digress.....

Anyway, we came home from ...someplace,... and entered the house through the front door.  And we were very quickly assaulted by swarming mosquitoes.... Naturally my father was OUTRAGED, and yes, I do mean that he exclaimed loudly and uttered some profanity! If you really knew him you get my meaning fully.  *wink wink

"Where on earth are these mosquitoes getting into MY house!"  My parents hurried to check that the screened in porch, which we never used, was secured.  There was no sign of an open door or breached screen.  Multiple doors and windows on the main floor were inspected in short order.  And that was when they realized that the worst concentration of the bugs was in the dining room.

"The DINING room!" .... that was where the fish tank was!

My parents hurried over to the fish bowl and, sure enough, there were more mosquitoes hovering above it... the goldfish were probably delighted! 

My father went to the garage and returned with a piece of screen that had been meant to use to repair window screens.  Using a pliers he quickly fashioned a cover to put on top of the fish bowl.

And that, my friends, is the entire story....  and nevermore did we have a fish bowl or tank of any kind in our home without some kind of covering over the top.

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Stonefield

My mother loved the rich history of America.
We went to a lot of historic places in the central part of the United States.
Most of our time was spent in Illinois and Wisconsin, with occasional jaunts through the southeast part of Missouri and into Arkansas,... or to Tennessee via Kentucky.
We did not make any grand tour of it, nor did we visit a great number of historic places....
but when we did stop for more than an hour.... those are the times I remember.

My niece was with us,... I am not certain who else,... when we visited Stonefield in Wisconsin.
There is not anything in particular that I remember about Stonefield.  It is just the best, clearest memory I have of a location.  Perhaps that is because, many times, the visits were shorter.
My niece, she is just a few weeks younger than I... the two of us, young teens, did not really want to visit historic villages.... we just wanted to hang out someplace where we could escape the summer heat,..and smoke cigarettes.  To be out of view of the grown ups, and smoke and talk about things that teenage girls talk about.

In reality we were paying attention to some of the history and the stories.... enough so, that as adults we agreed that we were glad that my mother "made" us visit historic sites.

Any time we were on a road trip to anywhere we kept an eye out for billboards advertising roadside attractions... on the lookout for anything that was "different" or any cave tours.... because our car did not have an air conditoner.  

Many places,... Hannibal, MO .... Sioux Falls, SD, .... Heber Springs, AR,....
Rebel Cave in Missouri,... Dog Patch,.... Mammoth Cave in KY,.... The House on The Rock in Wisconsin..... Wisconsin Dells.....

Years and years later I feel a warm sense of nostalgia whenever I visit a historic place.

Thanks mom.
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It's a pretty drive up to:
Stonefield Historic Site, 12195 County Hwy VV, Cassville, Wisconsin
take Hwy 133 from Potosi....through farmland and down to the east side of the Mississippi River.....
lovely little town. Cassville.
If you have the time to take your time, and to book ahead,...try to get a room at the Eagle's Roost... it was clean, quiet, and comfortable for one night.
(I was in Cassville for work in the fall a few years ago.
Autumn is a beautiful time of year for visiting southern Wisconsin.)

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Suzanne the plans.....and sunny days that I thought would never end.....

Riding in the car with mother.

Going to my favorite aunt's house.

Out to the river in the grove.

Driving on the lane through the hickory and tall oaks.

Fall. Colors. Burning leaves the only scent.

Gravely roads, off the beaten path,

onto a narrower lane still.

All the way out the car radio on. 

Simpler tunes, mostly gentle, a few humorous.

I sing along with every single one.

AM radio, FM as yet undiscovered country for me.

I am a gentle backseat driver at age 11, 12, 13...

Quietly commenting on red lights, 

or what other drivers are up to on the road.

Chiming in with "that guy needs no knocks" when there is a noisy car.

Making mother laugh out loud.

We talk about a variety of topics,

on those long drives out to the countryside.

Mother tells me things about driving cars.

lessons I file away for when I am the one driving the car.

Somewhere out there I made her a promise.

That she would never have to be alone.

Because I owed it to her to take care of her....

never thinking that one day she would live at my house....

The shared experiences of my adolescence,

bridging a gap until we could be just friends,

mother and I.

That is what we became.... long after....

after favorite aunts were gone,

most of them, and we had to make

new adventures of our weekends.

and then she was gone.

sunny days fire and rain

simpler times, simpler happiness sunshine on my shoulders

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NO SAD FACES she lived a good life, she was ready to go to her God,
she was a true believer (John 3:16).   Do not cry for her or for me. 
The past is past, and she would not want your tears, nor do I. 

NO SAD FACES.

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Alzheimer's is incidious that way.....

Alzheimer's disease (AD), also refered to simply as Alzheimer's, is a chronic neurodegenerative disease that usually starts slowly and worsens over time.

There was a time when I would come home from work to find her crying.
"Why are you crying? What's wrong?.... Did something happen?"
And she would sob: "I don't know."
I think she knew that something was happening to her,.... that things were slipping way, very slowly.
And, sadly, I prayed that God would take her, because I did not want to see her crying and afraid.

In the end I started to give her own pep talks back to her....  telling her that crying would not help. Telling her that she needed to keep busy.  Encouraging her to read and do word puzzles, anything to stimulate her mind.  We had NO IDEA what was happening to her.

Alzheimer's is incidious that way,...it steals in when no one realizes it, and it slowly steals away the mind,... not making it's victim crazy, making them lost and afraid.  And they KNOW-- they are aware that they are losing their way.  Can anything be more frightening? 

I had an Aunt who suffered from Alzheimer's, .... "suffered from" -that almost sounds gentle, but it's not gentle at all.  They told me that she would have moments of lucidity. She would suddenly state: "I'm afraid! I don't know what is happening to me." 

They lose their way.  They have trouble navigating through the day.  My mother would sleep.... a lot... too much. I believe that she dreamed her day,... she dreamed that she took her medicine (she did not take it),... she dreamed that she ate her lunch (she did not eat if no one was there to eat with her).... 
I had the evidence,... the prescription bottles, still full, well past the time for refills... weeks past.  
And no lunch was eaten,.... the yogurt was still in the fridge. It had been her habit to eat one container of yogurt for lunch, and to leave that container and spoon in the kitchen sink "to wash with the dinner dishes."  I would come home and find the sink empty...the yogurt was still in the fridge.

Thinking back, over the years,... back to when she came to live at my house.... there were little episodes... There were the times when I thought, "she's just forgetful." or "She is losing some memory/confused/doing that because she is getting old.  Because the little episodes do not alarm you.
The crying alarmed me, but it was one week out of twelve years,... I thought she put it behind her.... now I think that she forgot because she had Alzheimer's.  It snuck in, like a thief, and a little bit at a time it took her away.....from me, from everyone and everything she cared about.

She held tight to some things. She ALWAYS knew who I was. Always!  She knew her third husband's daughters. Thankfully they did keep in touch with her, and sent her cards always, or visited her.  If she knew a person, if they mattered to her --then she knew them on sight. 

People would call me....one of her nieces: "I visited  Aunt Lil, and she saw me coming down the hall and said my name!"
 .... her step-daughter: "I visited your Ma, and she knew who I was!"
They were surprised because they knew she had Alzheimer's.

This is what I know: people with Alzheimer's remember the past.  At least many of them do.  And if they can hold on to the here and now at all - you can ask them about the past, about their childhood, their children, their life, and they can tell you about it! It is the day to day, short term that is gone.
My mother? every 15 minutes she would ask, "What day is it?" she could not remember.  But she could follow a joke and know if it was truly funny.  

That was a thing though,... every 15 minutes.... because I knew for a long time that she was slipping away.... years before she went to the nursing home.  I realized that she was repeating.... people came to visit at the house, and they would talk with her for about 15 or 20 minutes, and at that point she would circle the conversation back to where they had begun.  Every 20 minutes. 

I took her out to visit people who could not, or would not drive out to see her.  I showed those people what was happening.  Every 20 minutes.  Every person I took her to visit saw it.  Every one of them knew she was going away from us very slowly.  I am thankful that those folks were able to see it, and that I did not have to explain to them where she went.

That is all of the story I can tell today.... it makes me too sad,... to go back over it again.... to remember the cruel, vile disease that stole her away.

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(What prompts me to write this now? a story about AD on a television program.)

Alzheimer's Assocation

Wikipedia -- Alzheimer's_disease

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the bicycle

We lived there less than a year.
In a Cape Cod -sytle home, on the "S" curve of U.S. Highway 83, about three blocks from the railroad track.  Also, about 3 blocks from the school I attended, Saint Raymonds.
I was 7 years old, so some of it is a bit foggy in my mind,... I was a child and paid more attention to childish things.

I remember that was were I learned to ride a 2-wheeler bicycle at last. There were training wheels on my little bicycle, and I was still uncertain about having that "safety net" taken away.  One day, though, I asked my dad to remove one of the training wheels.  This was mainly because I had heard more than one person comment that I was no longer actually using the training wheels.  I told dad that I would try riding it in the back yard, on the grass, if that was ok with him.... so that, if I fell the ground would be more gentle than the pavement.  Do you remember how difficult it can be to pedal a bicycle on grass?  Right, that lasted about 10 minutes.  I walked the bicycle to the front of the house and rode up and down on the sidewalk a couple of times.  Dad came out front to watch.  "Oh dad, take the other training wheel off, I don't need it!" I proclaimed.  And there I went! off down the sidewalk and back again.... and then, something I did not expect.... we put my little bicycle, which was the perfect size for me, into the truck of the car and drove to Bade's Bicycle Shop on Prairie Avenue at Center Street, in Des Plaines, Illinois.

The building that was once Bade's Bike Shop..... the trees were not there when I was 7......

I was instructed to pick out a "big" bicycle.  I picked out a blue bike and my dad had them install a basket on the front, and a bell on the handlebars.

The honest truth is that bicycle was too big,... I was not tall enough. But I could not let dad down, I had to accept that bicycle and ride it.  It was probably a good lesson in what I like to call "you gotta wanna",.... but it was also a dangerous thing, and we were all lucky that I did not fall or lose control or get hurt.  My dad was just so excited for me to ride a "real" bike, and at the same time not really in so much of a hurry for me to grow up.

I had that bicycle for 6 years. 

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SCHWINN

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