Frozen Ground

Well, she's planted. We all got there and there was a 1' square hole covered with a piece of plywood painted green, a small pile of dirt beside it. Then the whole thing was covered over with a fake grass rug, and Mother was in a 4" square cardboard box that had a sort of flower design on top.

Daddy had a folding chair to sit on. We then all just stood there. Since she was a Quaker, there is no minister or priest, and we had a maybe a 4 or 5 minute silence. My sister said, is someone going to come ? No one knew. So we all just stood there for another long uncomfortable silence. Eric, Caroline's husband, said it was OK if anyone had anything to say . More silence. My sister said that she had brought a camellia bud for Mummy. More silence. So I decided to say some thing about hoping there are horses there and that the Lord was going to have a grand garden. More silence. Since no one came to do anything finally we went, picked up the box, pulled back the rug and picked up the plywood, and put the box in the hole, with the camellia bud. Suzanne, my daughter in law, put a small string of beads she made, I put in some dirt, and we covered up the hole with the plywood and the rug.

My father is a devote Catholic, and Quakers say the Lords Prayer, so I decided to say that. Then we all hugged and left.

I think probably if my other sister who is a Quaker had been there, she would have been able to move us. We knew my mother didn't want a churchly fuss, but we couldn't figure out what to do. Very awkward. It was cold, with some snow left from the last storm. The work vehicle that brought the rug and the shovel left its tracks in the snow, and they had removed the snow from about a 15 foot square area.

This all took place in Mount Auburn Cemetery, full of heavy Victorian funereal pieces, winding roads with names like Wisteria and Thyme. My mother is in the Pickman family plot. She didn't like her in-laws in general, so it seems a little odd that she is there.

After that, we drove back for lunch to the house in Lincoln. Very good quiche and salad and cookies, still a big awkward for me there, my former workplace and home. It was decided to put back together the antique four poster that had been dismantled while my mother needed a hospital bed.

This bed is a massive piece with a baroque turning on the foot posts, it is held together with fat carriage bolts that have a big cube for a head. The pieces are numbered, but not completely, and the bolts that hold it together are different sizes. It took a lot of well-qualified people a very long time, with three retries, to get it back together.

Next day, I climbed back up into the sky, headed for CA. While in Boston, I saw some old and dear friends, had a good visit with my daughter. I got snowed on, navigated icy sidewalks, and balked at paying $3.99 for a head of organic lettuce. Boston is still rat race city, like most cities.

It was good to get back to the trailer in the middle of nowhere.

Unfriendly Skies

Saturday night found us headed for the airport in San Diego. My mother (90) died on Friday after a mercifully short bout with cancer. Since my time caring for my parents did not end well two years ago, her death was painful on several levels, so coming back makes me a little nervous.

The trip began splendidly with a grand meal in a spiffy restaurant on Harbor Island, the view was marred by a pea soup fog, with fog horns hooting out in the channel. When Don checked the flight, a red-eye to Boston, it was canceled because of the fog. I didn’t think airplanes cared about fog anymore, I thought they had so many gizmos they didn’t need to see, but no. So we drove the 70 miles back to Campo, and tried again in the morning.

The fog was gone, and the slow process of getting aboard and checked for bombs, and heaving my carryon up over my head began. A short flight to Las Vegas (I didn’t realize that the strip, including the bizarre pyramid and sphinx were so visible so far), and then the flight to Boston. The last leg was so packed that by the time they got to me, there was no room for my carryon so it was kidnapped and checked. This was annoying at the other end, but not lost, and my daughter Jess and her husband Jamie picked me up and took me back to their nice place in Jamaica Plain, part of Boston.

I have done a lot of flying, and I like getting somewhere, but after two years on an RV, it was a little unnerving to have to find and pack a suitcase. It was also strange to be in the sort of clear plastic tube of jet travel, where you can see other people in the terminal, and on the plane. Unless you connect with someone sitting next to you, it is like watching a badly edited documentary: not enough action and too much waiting around. Schlepping the luggage, small as it is, gets irritating, especially trying to get it all in the bathroom stall with you, or looking for a magazine. I like the disconnected feeling, and the bare slate of people who don’t know me, and going somewhere is always good.

The rest of my stay so far has been about stuff, my old stuff that was taken from the house, put in storage and then into Jess and Jamie’s storage space in the basement of their Victorian condo.. Each time I moved it, I threw stuff out or gave it away. Still, there were 50 some white cardboard file storage boxes left.

Clothes. Some of it is heavy winter clothes: I made a long heavy coat, double lined, out of a stripped Berber fleece about 25 years ago. It was as good as an igloo, and when the lining wore out, I patched it in a swirly applique design. It has gone off to keep someone else warm, but I confess I puddle up at the thought of never seeing or wearing it again. A lot of the other clothes I had forgotten about, they won’t fit me anymore, or they are too formal, so I don’t mind them going. I used socks to pack breakables in, and discovered 5 pairs of Polartec socks I had left behind thinking I didn’t need them as I would be following the sun.

Many boxes of books. Books seem to be a talisman of good thinking and a well-engineered and well maintained mind, not to mention a repository of information. As part of a set design for a play, the library of serious books is as important as the costume or the words to tell us about a character. Oddly, most of my books went without a qualm, as they are not the source of all things they were before the Internet. I make full use of the public library wherever I go. If they don’t have the book, they borrow it or even will buy it if they think it’s a good one. Then I can give it back when I am done. A whole box of cookbooks, don’t need them, since anything I might want to cook, I can Google it. Books that were expensive did give me a little pang.

Kitchen equipment. I take cooking pretty seriously, even in an RV (although the 5th wheel’s kitchen is bigger than the one in my apartment in NYC), and had an enormous collection of cooking tools and also kitchen décor. It pleases me no end that Jess and Jamie have taken and used a huge amount of that stuff. I confess I did rescue my very nice stainless flatwear to being back. In my kitchen I had a pretty big collection of real sea glass in bottles and also other glass that is frosted and in the same pale greens and blues. They all looked very pretty in the sunlight or with candles in them, I hope someone gets to like them too.

Art and art supplies. When you are hoping to work in any artistic field, you have to have some visible evidence of competence in this area, a portfolio. This is my excuse for saving way too many second rate efforts. I worked very hard, with some rather tight success on my watercolors for a while, and some did stand the test of time and will be saved, but a whole suitcase full of other stuff went, fairly free of qualms. And no one needs dried up markers.

Photographs. I think this pile best reflects the whole problem with stuff. I was always taking photos, sometimes putting them in albums, and even saving the negatives in the pre digital days. I guess I wanted to record what might be history someday, to leave a trace of our lives for someone to find, maybe my children, grandchildren and so on. Maybe even other people. Same with papers that document my past. My mother saved nearly all my report cards from school (began well, fell apart until senior year in HS, stayed B-ish all through college, went to A’s in graduate schools) newspaper clippings, review of shows I did the sets for in NY. I found pictures of my senior prom, old boyfriends, and pets. My mother gave me her mother’s letters to keep, knowing I had this urge to record and save. In antiques this is called ephemera. So, now my mother is dead, and someday I will be too. I must face the fact that neither of us is even remotely the possible subject of some one’s masters thesis, much less a biography. No history book will ever include us, we will only live on through some eccentric family stories, probably apocryphal after 20 retellings.

This is a pretty grim thought with my mother’s service on Saturday. This brings on all sorts of scary questions like what is it all for? Why am I here? Was my life, like the vanished possessions, ephemeral?

We talked about funerals and burials (Mom is being cremated, she wanted to be scattered off a mountain top in NH, but Daddy wants her next to him in the ground), all designed to help us feel as though something will be left, our soul? another life ? Will the trumpet sound and all the dead bodies will rise up, young and whole and fly up into a blue sky with pink Tiepolo clouds ? I am most inclined to the notion of reincarnation, which is close to the sense of my DNA going on. Reincarnation is also close to my personal feeling that my interactions with people form connections that are replicated in their interactions with others, in some giant chain of tiny neuron flashes. If I can make my signals good ones, then I have contributed to that blue sky, with pink clouds, if I make bad signals, and cause bad things to be replicated then I have added to the black clouds with lighting that hang over the skies of Hell.

My mother used to tell me that one action (in my case usually a bad one) was like throwing a pebble into a pool of still water. The round wavelet rings spread wider and wider, crossing even a big lake. So that my bad behavior would spread like ripples to others all round me. I wish the stones were color-coded so I could tell, as good intentions seem to make black clouds sometimes.