On my first morning in Pittsburgh, where I went to visit my mother and to attend the wedding of a friend, I went running on the Montour Trail. I only went a few miles, as I am still recuperating from a bout of plantar fasciitis, but it felt good to be on the trail, moving through the light and shadows.
It's alway heartening to see old infrastructure repurposed for new, nondestructive uses.
The next morning, I went to a nearby park, where I admired the raised deck that took me from the ridge to the riverbank.
Maybe I could live in the suburbs, I thought, momentarily entranced by my immersion into nature, which led me to forget about the manic automobile traffic I had to navigate in order to reach this oasis.
I went to the wedding with Stephen, and at the insistence of the bride and groom, we each brought home a box of cookies, which is a tradition in Pittsburgh; or more accurately two traditions, the first being the replacement of a wedding cake with a table of cookies, and the second giving boxes to the guests to take some away.
We shared the cookies with my mother, who seemed happier -- or at least calmer -- than she had over the past few years, when she was actively caring for my dying father. Although she no longer drives a car, she's reconnected with friends, she's going to exercise (balance) class, she's reading tons of books, she's attending concerts and recitals; she tends to her small garden. Except for the inevitable aches and pains -- 'It sometimes seems like old age is out to get you!' she told me, as if I didn't already know -- and enduring the whims of neoliberalized, for-profit healthcare, she seems to have a good life.
It was interesting for me to note how much more resilient women of her generation are than men. Recently, a man down the hall from my mother lost his wife to cancer, and he doesn't even know how to make a reservation at the dining hall where he's been eating dinner for the past however many years. It was, my mother explained when I asked about his futility, always something his wife had arranged. Without her, he was nervous and disconnected from any kind of social interaction. Meanwhile, my mother and a group of the deceased wife's friends picked up the slack for him, arranging reservations and hand-delivering the schedules.
I wondered if I would be the husband or the wife in this scenario and was relieved to know that the answer was neither.
After the weekend, I helped my mother with her garden. I moved some hostas and ferns, I rearranged the brown-eyed susans, I planted a clump of daisies that one of my mother's friends -- who is starting a native garden -- had donated to her. In the end, we didn't have to buy anything new; some minor adjustments were enough.
We did get some begonias for a pot my mother keeps on her porch.
When it was done, we admired our work. Like my mother, the plants seemed happier, more relaxed.
The outside world still felt very precarious -- and this was before the awful debate! -- but here we could still believe in small pleasures and accomplishments.
We watched the sun fade away as the birds -- including this red-winged blackbird, whose call we learned from an app my mother had recently installed on her phone -- perched on their favorite branches and sang their favorite songs.
Comments