Mom & Me Four Archive

...more so than yesterday. I doubt that we'll be getting outside to walker, today, since she had such trouble with the wind yesterday. We will, however, do some house walkering, assuming that Mom's feeling good, which I expect. Our project for today will be to clear the hearth and the firebox of our fireplace. We've decided to try using it this year, since we are using fewer fans and our open/closed window arrangement is much different. It's still much too warm to use it, but, considering that we've been using it for storage over the last few years, today's a good day to clear all that out. It's been used only once since our last chimney sweep so I'm sure it doesn't need another.
    Mom talked, yesterday, excitedly, about the possibility of snow. I couldn't believe my ears! I teased her about this and she said, "I'm getting tired of summer. We need a change."
    Good, good, good! She also talked about going back to "the Christmas store", so I'm feeling pretty jazzed about this fall, at least.
    As we talked about yesterday being "Rabbit, rabbit" day for October, she remembered that my birthday is at the end of the month. She hasn't remembered this for some years. I'm pleased about this. If her memory of it continues, I'll see to it that we make a fairly big deal of it, maybe even go out to dinner. Over the last few years when she hasn't remembered it, I've made plans and cancelled them, just because I couldn't get interested in more than a private, internal celebration. This year, though, maybe things will be different.
    Surprisingly, she also remembered that we don't get trick-or-treaters around here. We didn't in Mesa, either, although that was a gated, adult community, so that wasn't a surprise. It's a surprise, here, in the sense that nothing is keeping trick-or-treaters away except that kids are discouraged, if not expressly forbidden from doing that, now. We speculated, some on why this is so. I mentioned that parents seem to be much more afraid of sending their kids out to explore their vicinity than they used to be. We talked about how, as kids, we (her children), had a huge and partially wild area of neighborhood and boonies over which we roamed. We reminisced about the period after Typhoon Karen in the early 60's on Guam when many of the structures had been blown to bits in our neighborhood. For months us kids spent inordinate amounts of time exploring construction trash and discovering all the new frog pits that developed in the foundation sinkholes of the razed buildings. We talked about how Dad resisted moving us to the "planned and cleared" community of Oceanview for so long that, finally, we and one other family who'd resisted leaving the semi-overgrown quonset community of Old NCS were finally and reluctantly forced to move. She also talked about roaming "the hills" (meaning The Black Hills in South Dakota) and "the fields" (meaning the fields around Mechanicsville, Iowa) when she was a kid.
    "Too bad," she mused, "that kids aren't allowed to do that, anymore."
    "I know," I agreed. "It seems like kids have a natural affinity for less civilized areas."
    She nodded and rocked. "If I decide to have kids," she said (I love it when she replans her life in warped time), "I think I'll bundle them all up," she opened her arms and scooped up her imaginary future passel of kids, "and we'll all move back to The Hills."
    "Good idea," I said. "Can I come, too?"
    She gave me a startled glance. "Oh, of course! They'll be your kids, too!"
    Cool.
    Later.