Notes from Maine - 2022/04/17
This year seems to be moving very quickly. Another winter is behind us and everything is ready to burst to life again. My family left today. Mom was here for a month. My sister and nephew were only here for a week. We had fun. There isn’t all that much to do around here during mud season, but I feel like we made the best of it.
Soon, I’ll need to make a decision about the horses. The little filly is growing so fast—she’s almost as tall as her mom now. Everyone would be happier if I started turning them out together again, and it would mean less time required for chores. Before I do that, I have to get my head around giving the little filly a new home and preparing for another potential baby next year. This has been a wonderful experience, but I have to be responsible about repeating it. First, I have to make sure that I can find a good family for the little filly. She’s such a sweetheart. It will be difficult to see her go.
Earl is alone in the pasture right now. He’s getting better at spending time by himself, but it’s definitely not his preferred state. When his brother died, Earl was despondent for months and months. Back then, when I let him in the barn, he would run to his brother’s stall, calling in hopes to find him. It broke my heart every time. Some horses (most, I’m guessing) just can’t be alone. If I go out now, he will drop what he’s doing and come to the fence, hoping that I’ll come talk to him. Mom has him trained to expect carrots every time now. He’ll have to get over that.
This afternoon, I’ll put Earl inside and Maybelle will go out with her filly. The baby is now free to go wherever she wants—Maybelle gives her tons of latitude. I think that sharing a stall with her daughter is getting a little tiresome for Maybelle. When I separate them (practice weaning), they both seem a little relieved.
I was thinking the other night about how much my father’s life has changed in the past couple of years. There was a quick transition when he was in the hospital where we just took over the decisions for him. My brother took care of Dad’s house, and my sister and I took care of Dad. Then, when he went home, my brother took on more but we also helped him get self sufficient as much as possible.
Dad is fading now. His health issue are mounting and compounding, as you might expect. We’ve increased his care and we’re doing everything possible to make him comfortable. When he’s truly coherent, he recognizes that he’s in bad shape but he’s hopeful that he can recover. I simply agree—what would be gained if I were honest? He doesn’t need to know about the times when he couldn’t get up and only produced slurred descriptions of hallucinations. On a good day, he seems like a healthy, elderly man who’s just having a bad day. We’re all descended from fighters and survivors. It’s understandable that his will is instinctual and irrepressible. It’s sad, but understandable.
On the other hand, Mom is an unstoppable force. On this trip, she really learned the ins and outs of cleaning up old pinball machines. She got good at taking off and stripping coin doors in order to repaint them, and then learned how to rehabilitate old legs. She turned old, rusted rails into beautiful new shiny pieces and even tore down a playfield to ready it for artwork touchup. Any mistakes haunt her, but they don’t stop her from trying again. It helps that she’s so enthusiastic about playing pinball. She wants the machines to be in good working order so she can play them whenever she wants to take a break from her other self-assigned chores.
It’s weird and interesting to get to know so much more about my parents at this stage in life. There were years when we hardly spoke. Mom has forgotten a lot of her past (she blames a concussion), so you don’t get a lot of history from her. Dad only remembers things that happened in the first decades of his life, so I was fortunate to get all those stories from him a few years ago so I could write them down. I’ve learned a lot, but I still don’t feel any closer to understanding either of them. The world that shaped them was too different by the time that I came along.
