Three Beautiful Things 05/13/18: Mother's Day 2017, Cleaning Up the Yard, Family Dinner

1.  I went back a year in my blog to read what happened one year ago on Mother's Day. It all came back to me. Mom had been admitted to the nursing home about ten days earlier, but on Mother's Day Christy and Carol signed Mom out of the facility for several hours. Christy hosted dinner. Mom had asked for ribs and Christy complied and added corn on the cob, a fresh fruit salad, and strawberry buttermilk cake with ice cream for dessert. I talked to Mom on the phone from Maryland and I remember how happy she sounded and how hopeful I was that possibly she could rehabilitate and return home again.

I know that by the end of May, I continued to hold out this hope as I made arrangements to come to Kellogg in June, 2017, the day before Father's Day. I thought about this a lot today, how little we knew, really, about how seriously Mom's health was deteriorating and how, by Father's Day, when Mom had a scary and difficult afternoon of twitching, incoherent rambling, and restlessness, we knew it was doubtful Mom would return home again and that her illness and immobility were beyond our ability to care for her in her home.

2.  I returned to the back yard today and dealt with all the remains of my yard work from last week: I composted sod and weeds; I trimmed lilac branches I had cut down and put the trimmed branches in trash cans and filled other trash cans with more sod and weeds that wouldn't fit in the composter. Eventually, I dragged these containers to the front yard and will take them to the transfer station in the morning. I have much more weeding and trimming ahead of me.

3. The Deke prepared tonight's pork chop family dinner. In addition, she fixed awesome broccoli fritters and a remoulade sauce, something none of us had ever eaten before. She also roasted a batch of radishes and we all loved them.  Christy and Carol had a lot of stories to tell about their weekend in Moscow to celebrate Cosette's graduation from the University of Idaho and we learned a lot about what's happening in their gardens. The Deke and I are undecided about all kinds of things around the house and what we are going to do with the yard, garden, deck, and other things, so we couldn't really say much about what we are doing and what we are going to do, but talked about what we are unsure about.