Grayer than gray. My mood matches the day. The predicted 2 inches of rain that has everyone cowering next to their sump pumps is like not happening. There's a deluge for 2 minutes, then mist, then deluge, then mist...
This is the kind of day for reflection. The kind of day for finally organizing those thousands of family photos, moving them from the carefully labeled envelopes to the file boxes I bought for them last week. I'm barely awake when the phone rings. N is in town. With her two youngest (the twins are 17 now!). The friend she's staying with wants her out of the house for the day. She's on her way to my house.
In a sense, living on the east coast is living in the past. For so many people the past is a place as well as a time. So many people have left Massachusetts far behind that it's taken on a mythic collective past.
I'm living in N's past. I haven't seen her since the last time she moved "back east" about 10 years ago. We've known each other since we were 14. Her M.O. is to pack up and move when life gets out of hand. She comes here looking for "home". You can't go home again.
She's at the back door. One of the boys is with her at the door, the other is walking the dog. I yell that I'll be right down.
I made tea. We struggled to catch up on each other's lives. It's tough after so long with nothing but requests for money between us. She's got grandchildren now. She still looks like a hippie with her long brown hair. I look more like a grandmother than she does (Andrea's teacher called me Grandma yesterday at pickups). I have a hard time explaining that I'm not "out of work", that I quit quite voluntarily for specific reasons, to accomplish specific things, and no I'm not looking. Last time she was here I was a hard driving "high-powered" corporate executive. I have a hard time conveying that this is a positive change. The twins are so tall! N is short. Shorter than me. Their father was tall. The "sickly" twin for whom I paid for life saving surgery shortly after his birth is a strapping young man taller than his twin, and I think taller than his dad was.
I pulled out boxs of slides. N and her first husband before their son was born. The son as an infant. The daughter as a toddler. The wedding to the second husband. The twins as toddlers. Frost on the windows of the house they lived in in Missouri. Grandmother. Uncles. Aunts. Michigan. Missouri. Ohio. California. Dogs they used to have. A wolf pup her first husband reared. We spent hours poring over the slides in my little PanaVue viewer. Most of her family photos have been stolen. She asks if she can make prints from these. Of course.
We walked up the roast beef place on the corner, with the dog, and brought back sandwiches for N and the boys and a salad for me. This is the first time my dining room table has been fully populated since the winter solstice 2 years ago. We shoved the slides aside to avoid getting barbecue sauce on them. After lunch we continued until we ran out of slides.
After she left I napped for awhile, then made more tea and looked at more slides: my Grandmother's 70th birthday, the west coast cousins on a rare visit back east, Crystal and Alexander as kittens. Odd to see Crystal as a kitten when I'd gotten so used to her as old realy old really really old. She died this year at the age of 23 - pretty darn old for a cat.
Even older cat pics, prints from a cheap Kodak camera I had years ago. Thomas holding El Diablo de la Noce the black cat from hell. Actually from Zealand Falls in the White Mountains. Thomas was up there hiking with a school group in junior high when the hutmaster was closing up for the winter and wanted to find a home for the cat that lived under the hut. Thomas hiked the rest of the trip with Diablo in his backpack. It never occurred to him to ask the parents for permission. Diablo stayed for years.
Yup, we live in the past out here.
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