17 years ago

 Today is the 2nd day of the .... week [now that is an interesting question - is it the 53rd week?  The formal answer appears to be that it is the 1st week of 2025, but given that we haven't made it to New Year's Eve yet, that seems a bit pretentious], the 30th day of the 12th month, the 365th day of 2024, and:

• Bacon Day - the food not the actor
• Falling needles Family Fest Day
• Festival of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute - seriously a fact when dealing with financial services, especially loans 
• National Bicarbonate of Soda Day - a necessary celebration given all those last minute changes 
•  Peeps Day
• the 5th day of Kwanzaa - highlighting the principle of Nia, or purpose
• the 6th day of the Twelve Days of Christmas - either the Feast of St. Egwin of Worcester who died on this day circa 717 AD or six geese a-laying depending on your point of view
• the 2nd new moon of December occurs at 5:27 PM EST
• and Voyager 1 is ~23h 04m 07s of light travel time from Earth

Quote of the day:
~  Theodore Roethke - American poet 

"Over every mountain there is a path, although it may not be seen from the valley."

It was a tough year - I moved to the Enclave, moved my mother in with me, and then put my mother in a home.

My memories of the end of that year are a bit hazy, but it came back to me when I saw this Facebook "memories" post.

It was a painful time for me.  Uprooted from my apartment in Randallstown where I had lived for 22 years, mostly with Frank, it was an awful move in.  My mother, who's lease renewal had been refused where she was living moved in with me as well, and to say it did not go well is an understatement of colossal proportions as it became quickly apparent she was suffering from advanced dementia.  Things came to a head over the Thanksgiving holiday, which landed her eventually at Shephard Pratt, and then into an assisted living home in Perry Hall.

Mom never actually got completely unpacked - and that proved to be a good thing as she was adamant that nothing of hers could stay with me.  I spent my time boxing and making arrangements for the movers to come and pick everything up in the first week of January.  My mother wanted everything - her bedroom and living room furniture, all of the kitchen things, everything.  Not that she could use it all, most of it I had to arrange to go into a storage unit, but she did not want me to have anything of hers.   I hesitated over a couple of items - a collection of silver dollars I found in her Lane red maple hope chest and the doughboy helmet my grandfather wore in WWI, but into the boxes they went [As it turned out, she always believed I kept those things because they got lost, apparently left in boxes that she gave away].  There were boxes everywhere, in every room, piled high, and that was what I lived with as the year came to a close.  I didn't even take pictures of that time; I was beyond tears at that point but had absolutely no desire to memorialize what was happening.

After the movers left in January, I had empty rooms and literally nothing in the kitchen - had to buy paper plates and plasticware to function - and slowly, I started to rebuild my life in 2008.  I bought a living room set, spread out in the apartment, alphabetized the books, but didn't do anything with the kitchen, and adopted Kula [a siamese rescue cat from my daughter].  And then,  in the spring of 2009, I was laid off, and had to move again, downsizing radically - but that is a different story.  

As I sit in my new apartment, Christmas music playing, enjoying Triscuit's company and relaxing as I work from home, I can still hear through the years the echoes of the despair and exhaustion I felt as 2007 came to a close, and reflect in this December that "without a hurt, the heart is hollow".

May 2025 be kind to us all