What was your favorite age?

My husband, my lovely, sweet, generous husband’s mother is sinking into the miasma of Alzheimer’s and it is unraveling him.

I watched my father dance around the edges of dementia as he limped into his nineties, but he did continue to take in new information and even upbraid me with his Irish rancor when I repeated myself after he had processed and owned the new facts. But Nana is losing all sense of who she was, who her kids are, if she even has kids. She questions why she is living in this house, the home she lived in with her husband and seven kids for nearly 50 years.

Nana has settled herself in her late teens and early twenties. When she looks at old photographs of herself and her not yet husband, and all their friends at parties, visiting Atlantic City from Washington D.C. and she can tell you all their names, where she bought the fabulous hat and what they ate for dinner at the crab shack. But she often doesn’t know my husband, can’t recall that he is married and has two kids; and that makes him sad.

I watched my mother, near the end of her life, not really altered by Alzheimer’s, but shot up on morphine, and anti-depressants to get her through her life after a stroke. She was very interested in going to the place where her parents and her cousin lived. Both my mother and her cousin Robert were only children and they were raised more as siblings than just cousins. My mom adored Robert, a few years older than she, and there are photos of her trialing after him with a look of adoration spread across her grimy little face. Robert was a Navel pilot, shot down over Tokyo Bay and never found. My mother kept a picture of him, all gap toothed grin, smiling out. As she got near the end of her life she was in her late twenties and waiting to go to a party where Robert and her long-dead parents would be in attendance. Kind of a wonderful notion. For my mother.

But tough for those who don’t seem to make it into your conscientiousness. It sometimes made me feel as if I was diminished in her eyes. Why didn’t she want to return to the time when I was little or, graduating from school, or giving her grandkids?

It made me wonder, into what time would I retreat? Young mother with baby children, carefree romps in fields as a child myself, producing plays, gardening. I can’t predict what time will most captivate me. And as I think about that notion, I try to continue to make incredible memories, so when the time comes to revisit whatever moments my inner projector chooses; I will have a giant bank from which to choose.

I am content that Nana has a place to retreat when times are tough; but I am sorry my husband feels so sad when he sees her and has to confront the realization that he and his brothers and sisters are often not a part of the place where Nana has gone.

Life and old age are not for the faint of heart.

The Eyes Have It or Weepy VS Old

No, it is not some new weird, reality show where people wrestle... it is just the reality of my life as a mid-life mom, woman, worker, wending my way through life.

I ride my bike everywhere, you know that right? Well, I do and today it is beautiful, gorgeous enough for me to feel as if perhaps the universe is paying me back for all the lousy, rainy, cold days I slogged to and from work and meetings on my trusty three-speed. Today puts money in the weather bank and redeems the North East for the crazed days past.

So yes, of course, I am riding my bike back and forth to meetings today in the sunshine and wind. And I stopped to get my sunglasses adjusted, because it looks as if the season is upon us. As I walk in the shop my eyes are streaming tears. I had been told that light eyes, mine are like an Alaskan Husky, clear blue off-set by my no-longer “real” dark brown hair. (OK, to dye or not to dye is most definitely another post) But this is about eyes. The eye doc comes over and I proffer my good old Persol glasses apologizing for my weepiness and add, “ have always been told that light eyes are more sensitive to light and wind, and I am on a bike.”

“Oh no, that’s not the reason; it’s just because they are old eyes.” I swear he said that. Who would make that up? OLD EYES.

Well, I mumbled and made some snappy rejoinder. . . maybe, but I was stunned. My eyes were a thing I though might hold out and still be glorious until I hopped off the twig--a phrase my 86-year-old friend Beati uses when referring to her last mortal moment. I thought my skin would get the way it does--spotty and wrinkly--and there would be more floppy skin surrounding the eyes, but the blue of a great Carolina sky would hold me strong. They wouldn’t be clouded in a flood of weepy.

Now when I enter a store or go to a meeting I will be embarrassed about my watery eyes. I know they have always been runnier than most and I am challenging myself today to think: Are they different from 20 years ago water-wise?

I can’t recall. I seem often to occupy the moment firmly, both a good and bad thing. Here is what I want to know. Was there a reason for this eye doc to call my orbs old? And couldn’t we all do with a little more finesse when it comes to talking about other people . . . I mean especially right in front of them. I’m off to buy a pack of tissues to stuff in my bag to hide the tears.

Between Mother and Grandma

I caught a snake this morning.

You will see him, small, green, stripped, tender, like spring shoots. I have been catching and loving snakes all my life, well since I have been coordinated enough to get behind their head, stoop and scoop them up.

But now I am 57, and when I saw this little beauty slithering among my daffodils, my first instinct wasn’t to capture him. I was alone in the country with my gray barn cat Huey Newton. Kids away, husband having a weekend of loud stereo, steak for dinner every night and sports on three TVs simultaneously. I was supposed to be up here at the little farm to write, but spring is overwhelming to me. All I see are leaves to be raked, piles to burn, patches to weed and earth so fecund and glorious that I really do creak down to my knees just to inhale the aroma.

I also stop to sniff hyacinths, both gigantic and the delicate grape varieties and it was among the spring blooms that I saw my snake. In an instant he was mine. I held his head gingerly, close to what would be his ears, and watched as his red and black tongue darted in and out feeling the air for clues. He wrapped his body, about six inches worth of him, around my arm and I felt that familiar cool. I love a snake, smooth, cool, sinuous, I know all the subliminal stuff, but hell if “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” than can’t a snake be a luscious wild thing to scoop up bravely at 57, same as I did at 7.

I held him and sat down on the garden bench and called out for the only other creature in earshot. “ Come here Huey; I caught a snake.” And then I cried. I wanted to call out for my baby boy, but he is in the college library finishing papers, studying. I missed not having a little boy with whom I could share my triumph of catching a snake at 57. I thought about friends with little boys, but they are city boys and, in truth not very gentle, or respectful of animals. I thought of my grandbaby yet to come, orbiting the universe waiting for me, the way I waited for my kids to come to me. And I cried more because I missed not having the magic of little kids in my life.

I am between mother and grandmother; I do not want to rush my children into being parents when I took such a leisurely path, but I see time catching me behind the neck and holding me as I wriggle from time to time. When I fell and twisted my ankle, I felt that grip of time, when I got sunburned yesterday in the first spring blast; I saw my unprotected skin suffer. So today I held a beautiful ribbon snake and giggled by myself after my tears subsided. That is me; always has been me; a flip from water works to elation.

We're not alone...

If there is one thing that separates the self-employed from those employed by others, it is their preoccupation with health insurance.