A Moving Tale

We were moving my parents into assisted living, so the destruction done by the mere passage of time, was on my mind. I was still stunned and reeling from the changes in my parents, just in the couple of months since I'd seen them last. It was heartbreaking to see them like that, and terrifying to imagine going that way myself.

That can happen? Was it time to plan my preemptive suicide?

Meanwhile, our goal was to create a mini-version of my parent's house as quickly as possible so they'd sleep in a semi-familiar setting that first night, diminishing the confusion. Among the things being moved was a picture of me taken when I was in high school. It had hung in my parent's bedroom forever, so it would hang again.

The movers were four beefy blond boys in their twenties who chatted to each other about their gyms and work-out regimes while lugging boxes and dressers.

My brother was in the new living room. I was around the corner unpacking the bedroom when I heard one of the movers say, "Whoa!" and make  hubba-hubba noises.

Another one of them added his male appreciation grunts, and asked my brother, "Who's this?"

"It's her," my brother answered, indicating me.

A stunned silence fell. The silence of young brains confronting  the cruel ravages of time. The awkward, lengthening, silence of troubled minds asking: "That can happen?"

Ha!
xo Amy

One Black Ant

Back home in California I never saw a lone ant. 
 
Sometimes I'd unsettle a swarm in the garden and they'd spill like liquid in all directions. They occasionally made their long jagged march across my kitchen wall or descended like a brown fog on the dog food. But here in Michigan, at my parent's house, there seems to be one lone ant; a big, waxy-looking black one.

I noticed him for the first time a few weeks ago, struggling across the pile of the beige living room carpet. It seemed a dry and miserable trip so I scooped him up and rushed him out the door. But when I opened my hand, he was gone. I assumed I'd dropped him along the way and I didn't think about him again until I was sitting on the toilet a few days later and saw him hurrying across the white bathroom counter. He circumnavigated the sink then headed across the rough wall paper toward the towel rack.

His mission was a mystery to me, but his pace was clearly that of someone with a plan. Other than stopping briefly to rub his abdomen, and another time to rear up on his tiny hind legs to take the long view, he moved with the same certainty on his circuitous return trip to the sink.

I didn't grow up in this house, I've only known it as a guest. But this is where I've brought my children every summer of their lives, it is where they grew up and my parents grew old.

Since that day in the bathroom watching the ant, I've been distracted by things like my dad's four day stint in the cardiac care unit with swollen purple feet and Sun Downer's syndrome, and the near-impossible search for non-smarmy, bullshit-less advice for my mom's Parkinson's and vision problems.

But now, I just saw the ant again on that small nude sculpture in the den. We'd been discussing the possibility that the den furniture might fit in their new assisted living apartment. We haven't yet received the exact dimensions of their room. We hope it will accommodate the big brown chair, the coffee table and both small green couches, although we all secretly suspect that just one couch will fit, and even that will be a squeeze.

A moment later, the ant was hurrying across the brick of the hearth. Next, he veered off toward the blinds across the sliding glass door. 

I wonder if that ant has been at his thorough exploration every moment between the times I'd noticed him. The den is a long way from the bathroom. Was it a four day hospital stay away in ant distance? Had he covered every room between the two with equal energy and focus? Does that make him better prepared for moving day than the rest of us are?

When I think back to these goodbyes, will I remember the deep, dry pile of the beige carpet? The smoothness of the bathroom counter? The coolness of the small white marble sculpture? The black waxy ant? My parents as they once were?

xo Amy