Talking to Home

Just got off the phone from my weekly call to my mother.  Hubby has timed me and says I am always at least an hour talking to her.  I would divide up these minutes but my parent's schedule, appointments and outings, and my schedule, appointments for Hubby and outings, make it difficult to coordinate.

Our talks go like this...

First it is health matters.  There is always news on this front these days.  Last week it was my father has a cane now.  I took that a bit hard and find the image of Dad with a cane a rather poignant one.  My father, ex military, always took his fitness seriously.  He wore out many stationary bikes and rowing machines and usually walked back and forth to work all his life.  He is the reason I still do jumping jacks just about every day.  He would lament at times that he was missing out on the great shape  he'd be in if he'd stayed in the army.  But anyway, so be it.  He needs a cane mostly because of medications making him unsteady.  If only there was a way to avoid needing those darn things in the first place.

Then Mom and I start to go through the family. She is one of six children, all alive still and in their eighties, but most suffering various ailments. I fill her in on her great-grandsons' activities here; she loves hearing every little story.

She fills me in on home news, accidents, politics, and all the local. Like her mother before her, she takes a keen interest in the politics of the island, the cabinet shuffles and how tax dollars are being spent. ( I don't share that interest particularly.) Winners is building a new stand-alone store there.  Everyone can't figure out why they didn't go into the space vacated by Target when they left last year, that sort of thing.

Lastly we talk about t.v. news, the weather and finish up with what we are cooking for supper.  She loves trying out various recipes she finds on Pinterest and hearing what I or the daughters are cooking.  Dad jokes that he is still her guinea pig.  Grocery shopping has always been enjoyable for her and more so now it seems.

We make our good-byes quick ones.  She is soft and I keep it light, despite the wrench it always is for me to hang up. 

                       Mom's raisin buns, she had ready for us when we arrived last summer.