Pardon me while I pause to scratch innumerable mosquito bites incurred while watering our fledgling garden of weeds. The dandelion lawn buzzes and thrums in the twilight. I hope the bees can sense the vibrations of the mower, because tomorrow we're tearing everything down.
...
Today has been a little rough. I'm tired enough that I momentarily forgot whether one space or two between sentences was the appreciated grammatical norm. I am that tired.
The day may have actually begun on board flight 127 after I drifted off to sleep in the middle seat, cradling Lula's leg with my left arm and trying to stop Nell's head from insistently lulling into the aisle with my right. Then with the relatively mild turbulence (I only had to bargain with the Fates two or three times for my continued survival) over British Columbia, I was awake and riveted to snippets of a silent feature in The Revenant caught between the spaces in the seats in front of me, and to the creeping strangeness of dawning daylight over the east wing as we headed north. Somehow, Iñárritu's textural long shots and closeups of DiCaprio's beard added up to an expected and blasé homecoming. Friends were sighted at bag check, luggage retrieved, remarkably dry and un-Seattle outside air remarked upon. And we were home.
I get a pleasurable frisson of surreality after arriving in a new city. Driving in Seattle was a novelty of highways and concrete, speed and taillights. We put almost two thousand miles on that rental Camry. Now when I'm behind the wheel in Fairbanks, those city visions overlay on the green forested road overhang like a phantom x-ray. I'm here in Alaska, turning on Murphy Dome Rd, but simultaneously switching lanes on Rainier Ave South.
We finally fell asleep this morning after 4am. The house was cool upon arrival, the garden boxes speckled with dead starts and overconfident weeds (I will pluck you all tomorrow, assholes). We'd turned off the furnace and couldn't figure out how to recaliber the thermostat. I still don't know what's going on but I'm hopeful we'll figure it out before September. There was a spider crawling across the bathroom floor, and a sense of disuse permeated our room. Cold sheets never felt so good. Even the simultaneous arrival of the twins in our bed couldn't deter me from falling fast asleep.
But I have spent every waking moment, from 9 o'clock on (that sounds luxurious, but c'mon), thinking about and dealing with my mom, and her unexpected (and yet inevitable) trip to the Fairbanks Memorial ER yesterday, while I was still preparing for my departure from Seattle.
Some things in life work out the way you expect them to.
The smell of my basement garage is a comfort. Somehow my whole life has been leading up to having a garage that smells the way it does: like my Aunt Judy's basement of pool tables and stacks of magazines, of a dank and cool subterranean hideaway from the blazing heat and humidity of a Pennsylvania summer. It's a smell like the upper stories of the UAF Rasmuson library and its orange Wes Anderson-industrial design library carrels and pages and pages of almost-mildewy books. I am an adult with a garage full of wood and tools and garden supplies and boxes and bicycles and books, and it smells the way I thought adulthood basement garages would smell, of adult things and uses and memories. There is a mess on the floor of spent costumes and boxes full of half-forgotten memorabilia; this is my reward for being an adult––this is the future I've earned.
Some things in life turn out differently, in ways I didn't anticipate.
When I was little, I suppose I might have had a quasi-conscious fear of my parents dying (because they may have been 10-20 years older than the rest of my peers' parents). Sometimes kids in my class were picked up early from school for special outings or lunch dates with their divorced parents. This was the time that they had together. Sonya Funaro and her divorced dad, probably sharing a Happy Meal together at McDonalds. Was I jealous? My parents never picked me up from school early. But I imagined the knock on the 5th grade classroom door anyway, and it would be the principal, somberly informing the teacher that my father or even my mother (my father's junior by six years) - or both - had died of a heart attack or a stroke. I would bite my lip and hold back tears as I bravely accepted news of my fate as an orphan. I was special, so very special, because my parents were so much older than yours.
When I thought of my parents dying, I thought it would happen like in a Victorian novel, in a flash, like an accident or a stroke. What I never anticipated was the inexorable slide into old age and senility. I never imagined the feeling that my mother is still my mother and yet not herself.
This is what I know: my mother somehow tripped or fainted or rolled off her bed sometime during the night on Wednesday. She doesn't know what happened. She has problems with her short-term memory now. She has the beginnings of dementia, a recent diagnosis. My mother spent 14 hours lying prone on the floor, insisting to my father that she was fine, just fine, nothing to worry about, but absolutely fine on the floor and can't or won't get up thank you very much. My poor, confused father who hates change and ruffling feathers––he didn't call 911, but waited until our family friend and caretaker Mercedes came over on Thursday, mid-morning. And then my mother insisted to Mercedes that she shouldn't call anyone, but Mercedes called Julia, who called the ambulance, and my mother ended up in the ER for a few hours of tests, but was then released home. My father was exhausted. Mercedes spent the night, just to make sure she would be there should anything else happen. The ER doc told her she needed to see her doctor. So I was there to deal with the fallout today.
When we moved from Seattle to Fairbanks (six years ago this August, for those keeping track), my life plan looked something like this:
- Quit meaningful-and-reasonably-lucrative-yet-non-soul-satisfying job
- Maybe start a family but, who knows, I'm probably too old and not incredibly fertile enough for that to happen
- Play lots of cribbage with my dad
- Pick blueberries in the fall
- Sing with my mom in a chorus
- Realize my full potential as artist-writer-musician by devoting all my no-doubt copious free time to these pursuits
This would be more like it:
- Caregiver
- Occasional dabbler in the arts
- Giver of care
- Caring giver of time
- Time-crunched giving care-person
Every visit to Seattle yields ghosts of potential futures and the could-have-beens of the past. Great Uncle Ted lived at the Ida Culver House. Maybe I could move my parents in there. Maybe we should have bought a place on the upper west-side of Frelard with a retro-60s bathroom and parquet floors, and it would smell like a library and grandma's basement garage, and it would be home. It hurts to visit Ballard and get lost in condo mazes. Both because it's different than how I imagined it would be and because I know I couldn't afford to live there anymore if I wanted to. There's a ghost Genevieve who has come to terms with the rising tech industry of South Lake Union, or heck, may have even been a part of it, a Genevieve who's brash and confident and can afford to live in the city now.
I wish I could holler
I wish I was a baller
I wish I had a job that made a little more dollar
John and I are building an art cabin somewhere on the property. That makes it sound grander than the reality of it: a small, 8'x12' structure perched precariously (but soundly––who needs you, Seattle Fault Zone!), probably something with a view. There might be an upright piano tucked into a corner, but there is definitely supposed to be solitude and creativity within––a chance for long-forsaken printmaking and watercolor pursuits to have a space. But I wonder, even with a room of my own, whether or not I'll have the time to reanimate the ghost of my former self, now that I am a full-time caregiver.
This is not what I anticipated life to be.
