9:39 pm Eastern/Standard time. 6:39 pm Pacific. 8:40 pm Central. 11:40 am Perth. Hello.
My mom is safe asleep in her new bed, dreaming a dream that is not the nightmare that is all she remembers of cancer. All day she smiled and made jokes with me and with the nurses and physical therapists who care for her now, and all the jokes came out dry and just a little bit sarcastic because she inflects no emotion into anything she says. "I'm back in business," she said as seriously as anyone possibly could have. "I can't wait to see you on Monday," she said to the occupational therapist before she left for the weekend. I knew what she meant -- that she was tired after what was surely the busiest day that she has had in five months. A different therapist every fifteen minutes or half hour; walking; talking with me; eating three meals. Yes, I knew what she meant. There is a look in her eye that I learned to read when I was born. Hers is a body I know like a home. But she is different now. She pulled herself through the nightmare, and has become another incarnation of my mother, the homemaker, the housewife who packed my lunch every single day of my school career from kindergarten through the twelfth grade. She has become an enigma, a beautiful mystery, a person who possesses a strength beyond my wildest imagination.
And yes, I have fiddled with the layout again. The print is Anni Alber's; she and her beau, Josef, were design geniuses. Thank you Anni, and thanks, Chris, for the inspiration and the know-how.
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