It's Saturday, Florian and I have been sick for days, and we've been snowed in since last night! Might as well write a blog post.
Last weekend, we were going to take a nice romantic trip to West Virginia for some hiking and relaxing.
But why relax when you can obey an anxious, dangerous, and emotionally fraught compulsion? We decided at the last minute to drive 7-8 hours instead to upstate New York, where my parents' house in the Adirondacks may sell anytime and we both wanted to go there one more time first.
It is still so bizarre to be in places where every inch feels like my Mom--but she's not there!
The dogs got some good running around but I was worried about Dahlia and her bald pinkness in the cold.
The dogs only got warm when we all got under the blankets for a cold, sleepless night.
One night of that was enough! After a thorough, cathartic emotional breakdown, I was able to leave there feeling satisfied. Satisfied that we'd honored Mom and her love for that place. And satisfied that for me to consider keeping that place, and imagining that I could be content living in Bleecker, NY or keeping it and visiting it maybe a week out of the year and letting it rot the rest of the time, is completely bonkers (as Mom would say).
We took a slow drive back through back roads and stayed in a Motel 6 on the way back. Heaven for dogs and humans, though this human didn't sleep there either.
All that emotional stress and a few nights of no sleep meant immune system meltdown! All week its been a challenge to get out of bed and get the dogs out, but I've done it.
Even today, when I could barely get the doors open due to 15 inches of snow and counting.
Since it wasn't like we could do much of anything else, Florian and I decided to take a walk/ski with the pups through the neighborhood. And Fozzie, who can't handle humans locomoting in an unusual way, decided to attack Florian's skis.
Little chilly Dahlia would probably have had a better time if she'd let me put on her booties, but she is a dog so a reasonable move was out of the question.
We got those shivering things home and rested ourselves for a few hours before cabin fever compelled us to take another walk, this time without the pups.
A couple miles through partially plowed streets,
and Florian almost became one of those frozen explorers they unearth in a PBS documentary a few centuries from now.
Good thing it's so beautiful!
And good thing Dahlia can be persuaded to go out and pee.
Because looks like we won't be going anywhere for a while.
If any of you has ever cared for an aging parent, or let go of old family possessions, you know that some processes take a lot longer and are a lot more complicated than you ever expected.
I think we've done 3 or 4 7-hour drives to the Adirondacks since my Mom died, each one "the last." My dad really wanted to go, and once Florian was on board I didn't have the will to argue.
Alright then, we'll make the best of it. I knew that with the dogs in tow, there would at least be some good moments along with the challenges.
With Uncle Johnny along and Dahlia in my lap the whole way, the trip north was better than I expected. And of course, on arrival the dogs were delighted to be in nature with so much space to run around.
The house is still in good shape, though it definitely needs someone to be living there and loving it again. Though I'd dreaded it, it was actually good to go through the rooms again and pay homage to all Mom's things
All the love that she put into that place, the care that she gave it, the dedication with which she cleaned and arranged and decorated and just lived.
It was nice to see many of her plants still thriving and in bloom
and to visit her garden with the little shed where she used to rest. As expected it was kind of sad, but it was also happy. Reassuring somehow to see that life goes on.
That though Mom is no longer tending her garden, her garden continues to grow with the energy she imparted to it all those years.
When I was growing up, we had no shower in the house so we used to wash up in the brook.
So it was no real hardship that we had no running water for this weekend. When we needed to freshen up,
we just gave the dogs a holler, they came galloping along down the hill from the house and down to the brook,
where there's still roughly the same configuration of rocks that was there when I was a kid.
So Florian could still wash up in the "deep pot" close to the rock bridge,
which was where the horse-drawn carriages used to go before there was a road.
And while he did that, I could walk along the brook surrounded by the mosses and ferns and trees that I grew up with, and the dogs could run and sniff and zoom and climb on a beaver dam and get wet and run some more.
I love that forest. The water, the ferns, the moist forest floor covered in fragrant pine needles,
the mushrooms and the red salamanders, the fresh woody smell, the silence.
I love the thought that we can always go back there and camp or stay in a B & B, and not have to worry about the house or the water or the memories or about being Senior Coordinator, and just enjoy the woods and the trails.
What a great support network and mood elevator, to have those dogs around.
They're not worried about old memories or family stresses, they just know that Mom would have wanted them to have a blast
and bury Milk Bones in her gardens, and come back with a filthy nose.
There was no TV or internet,
but Uncle Johnny and Florian had the brilliant idea of bringing some DVDs for entertainment.
So we even managed to have a nice, relaxing time in the evenings.
And when there was a thunderstorm on the second night, and I was finally exhausted and relaxed after two nights of lying awake worrying about the house and my dad and what exactly I was doing bringing an 82-year-old and an 87-year-old man to a remote house with no running water and no internet or phone,
there was nothing to do except just go cuddle up and sleep.
Right Fozzie?
Last week, Florian and I took my dad up to my parents old house in the Adirondacks to get some of my parents' belongings, do some cleaning, and meet with a realtor.
I'd been dreading this trip for a while. The memories, the sense of absence, most of all the necessity of letting go. This was where my parents took me every summer until I moved out, the site of many a family hike to a swimming hole, many a summer trip into town to do laundry, many an afternoon playing with salamanders and frogs or building a little house out of tongue depressors with Uncle Johnny.
How exactly does one let go of all that?
I am not sure. I do know that most adults who outlive their parents have to do it, and that it's a struggle for many.
Memories are so alive in a place. Being there, in the hot, sunny air, the silence, the stillness, it could have been 33 years ago and my mom could have been up in her garden on the hill, puttering, planting, harvesting lettuce and zucchini like she did every morning.
There's a feeling of timelessness, of dropping into an immediate and preverbal place of connection.
Like time, encompassing the safety and satiety of childhood as well as all the intervening years of leaving home, finding my way through boyfriends, jobs, mortgages, heartache and success, is a seamless fabric that still includes all those things.
That I can wrap around myself and touch each moment.
And there really is no separation between now, when I have my own house and family and responsibilities, which include taking care of my own "kids" and my Dad,
and back then, when everything was taken care of.
The flowers my mom planted are still blooming and happy,
and the brook is rushing, clean, and the water surprisingly warm as it always was in a rainy year in the summer.
Uncle Johnny's log cabin down the road, that he built with his own two hands when I was growing up,
then sold when he realized he was a city boy and could never live in the remoteness of the Bleecker Road, looks well-cared for and happily lived in.
The "chicken coop" that my teenage brothers tried to sleep in one night, but came running back to their bunk beds in the main house as soon as the owls started hooting and the bats started flitting about, collapsed years ago.
The ruins remain, and the Keep Out sign I got for my Dad when he was using the coop as a writers retreat one summer, keeps its ironic vigil.
The house, with its wood paneling installed when my parents had the incompetent but honest, and somewhat endearing, George Battiste build the upstairs addition when I was about 12,
still has that pleasant, comforting smell, woodsy with a touch of mildew.
The couch that Lamar always loved is still there, and he still loves it.
There was pain in remembering, and in feeling the absence of my mom, but I guess I hadn't realized that there would also be joy. In going through my mom's things, cleaning, organizing like she would have wanted me to. Loving the place and honoring my mom's love for it.
Major mood boosters were of course Fozzie, who though tuned in to his humans' emotions was even more tuned in to the opportunity presented by a frisbee and a large open space,
And Florian, who took time out from helping go through things to practice some ballet
but found that an Arabesque is much harder to execute flawlessly when Fozzie is humping your leg.
Our last night, there was a thunderstorm like my Mom always loved. A Bleecker Whirlagig, where the storm circles around and keeps coming back.
As Fozzie panted and drooled, I couldn't help but feel even more connected to her
and feel happy, as she would have been, that all her plants were getting watered and that the froggies would have lots of places to swim.
Yesterday it was exactly a year since the last day I saw my mom, leaning in the hallway of the sweltering city apartment as Florian and I left, wearing a blue and white shirt that brought out the blue in her eyes.
Feeling pulled to stay with her but hearing her reassure me that she'd be fine, and anyway she'd be joining us in Maryland in less than two weeks.
I return from our trip now feeling more at peace than maybe any time since then, knowing that I took care of the house she loved, and in so doing took care of her as she always took care of me.
The dogs only got warm when we all got under the blankets for a cold, sleepless night. 
