Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

On the way to the old house, Mom was thinking about the couple of things she'd forgotten or overlooked. Her sewing kit (luckily she was reminded of that by my dad needing a patch on a favorite pair of pants after they got snagged when he was crawling around rearranging things so it would all fit in properly) and a pinch bowl. "I don't know what to do about that," she fretted about the latter. "Grandma [my grandma, her mom] gave it to me, but... No one wants these things any more. I suppose I have to just close my eyes and throw it in the dumpster."

When we got there and she handed me the box with the punch bowl, I walked halfway to where the dumpster is, stopped like I was in a goddam after-school special and had just learned my lesson, turned around and put it in the car. Which meant it was going with us. It was going with me.

Soon I texted my little family with the news: "We are getting a very 70s pinch bowl." mother_bones texted back right away: "Oh hell yes!" I was delighted to get to tell Mom she'd been wrong about no one wanting this stuff. She seemed surprised to say the least, but then said "Well you guys are young, you might use it!"

Hell, even if we just put chips in it at parties, we will use it.

I am so glad to have it. When I was tiny, I was given the job of serving punch at the open houses held for my grandparents' 40th wedding anniversaries. I was about seven for the first, maybe ten for the second, so it felt like a great grown-up job and also punch is kind of like pop but fancy which was about as good as it could get for my tiny sheltered brain.

The other thing I took that I couldn't bear to let it go is a jug and basin I remember as a fixture of that house, always visible when we were playing in the basement. It turns out it was made for my mom by her best friend, in the latter half of the 70s based on where my mom told me my parents were living when Mom got it. Mom and Dad said they had no use for it, but I am confident my household will enjoy it.

I can't tell you how glad I am that I have a weird little family in time to give good homes to the things I want to save from the house where I grew up.

#

Just before we left the farm for today -- house cleaned, dumpster full -- my dad picked raspberries and my mom took some to their neighbor. Family friends live just down the street! It's such a nice novelty that this sort of thing is possible for my parents.

My mom ended up being gone so long, even though the person she went to see wasn't home, that I had to intervene with the dinner she'd started. Another neighbor had told her no one was home at the house she went to, and she got talking to him, and another guy who maybe lives on the other side, and it was so funny to hear her rendition of their conversation: my parents, always so nosy, found out that they have been the subject of gossip themselves!

When my parents went to view this house, these two saw them and reckoned they'd buy it. Then they saw us bring carloads of stuff, and marveled at how much stuff in how many trucks, wondering how much Mom and Dad thought they could fit in this house. They have a bet on how long it will take my parents' farm to sell: one said two weeks, one said definitely less than a month but maybe more like three weeks.

They were amazed that my dad is the age he is and asked my mom if she went to high school here too. My dad knows five generations of this one family: two either side of the guy who lives near the end of the road; but he joked that he had to go to the Big City (of about 18,000) to find her.

I wasn't looking forward to today at all. I slept badly, I am fed up of physical labor and emotional labor. I'm feeling so damn lonely, even as I am enjoying the replies and laugh/cry reactions on Mastodon to...just...documenting things my parents say or do.

And, for all my efforts not to be, I am genuinely struggling at both the environmental and societal waste that I have to participate in today, because it's the day the dumpster arrives at their old place to be filled with things that shouldn't go in it.

We didn't do that much with the dumpster today, but there was plenty of nonsense. We stopped to pick up the dolly/sack truck from the neighbors again on the way to the old house. They'd suggested on Saturday that we hang on to it but my dad said no. Then today we had to move a safe, an old stove, and a giant refrigerator all either up or down (or both) a level so...uh...yeah we did still need it! And even then, we returned it so early in the day that when we dropped it off the neighbors thought we were just coming to pick it up. They said we could keep it, or their trailer, if we still needed them. But once again: oh no, no need.

Couple hours later, my dad and I were taking the slow route to an auto salvage place about 15 miles away, with a 50-year-old bale rack (made from wood from an even older barn my dad's family took down, I learned today!) towed behind his pickup, with some stuff tethered to it by ratchet straps that didn't really have anything to get purchase on in the wooden rack. After a couple miles, Dad said "I guess we could've borrowed the trailer..."

While we were gone, Mom was frantically cleaning the old house. Dusting the HVAC registers, she announced "They're just going to have to accept that it's not perfect!!!!" "They" are the house buyers, who don't even exist yet as real people. They're just tormenting my mom so far with their cruel and unforgiving standards for the state a house should be in. "I'm not going to get the windows cleaned!!!" she told me a minute later, then clearly couldn't live with this decision and started taking screens off and Windexing the glass with old newspaper.

When I got back to the old place after the exciting bale rack trip, it smelled like Lysol as soon as I open the door. Turns out my mom has been spraying it all over, when she finishes cleaning a room. Just...into the empty room! I think this must be like burning sage for old white midwestern ladies. I walked around my old bedroom pointing the can downward in the direction of the skirting boards to humor her.

Unfortunately, while Dad were gone, Mom fell and hit her head and her bad knee. Of course she'd carried on cleaning after that, and was hobbling around with parts of their desktop computer even as she was telling me what had happened. She told me she couldn't even stand up at first. I was terrified she had a concussion and grilled her about a couple of common symptoms which she said she didn't have. She was more worried about her knee which was badly swelled. Even she had to admit she needed to put her wrap on it. I said we should go home right then so she could do that, and rest and ice and elevate and all that. Of course she refused and hobbled around doing practically everything else she'd wanted to do there before we left. (The one concession she did make to her injury is that the outsides of the windows won't get cleaned. ffs.)

When we got back she had the ground beef cooked and the potatoes cut and boiling before I had finished hauling things in from the car, but after that she did let me finish making dinner. (Her favorite, mashed potatoes and hamburger gravy, for them; I had Impossible chicken nuggets which were new to me (I think I've had their burger, but nothing else) and pretty good, along with the potatoes. And luckily they don't buy canned vegetables as much as frozen ones you steam in the microwave now. Those are fine; I never get enough veg here so I'm always happy to see them.)

After we ate Mom put out a bunch more decorations from that box of seasonal decorations I found in five minutes this morning -- y'know, that one she gave up on totally and determined she wouldn't put up any decorations until Christmas. She opened the box, put one fabric pumpkin in the middle of the dining room table, but then declared that she wouldn't bother with anything else because she had nowhere to put it. She'd already covered the end tables, coffee table, and little shelves and ledges in various ornaments so now there was no more room! Five minutes later, she was swapping her angels and crystal and crystal angels for more pumpkins. She seemed so happy. Insisted it was good for her knee, even though it patently wasn't (she is not as good at hiding it as she thinks).

I helped her re-organize the boxes of decorations and encouraged her to let me bring a box upstairs to hold the handful of things she wanted to take back downstairs. She refused and while I was helping Dad try to sort out his new DirecTV account I looked up and saw her at the top of the stairs with four or five breakable things precariously balanced in her arms. I rushed toward her and took one of the biggest off her, and then we made our way downstairs and almost to the box all this stuff was supposed to go in before she dropped a heavy glass candle holder that was full of glass beads. The beads just rolled around but the rest of the glass shattered on the concrete. We were both barefoot so had to yell for my dad to bring the broom and the vacuum. By the time he did (I marveled at how incurious he was at a huge version of the distinctive noise of glass hitting something heavy), Mom was picking through the shards herself anyway and going "ouch!" every so often but not, y'know, stopping.

Its frustrating because I knew she was going too much, she's slow on the stairs at the best of times and was taking them even slower now, and why carry breakable things in your hands instead of letting me get a box??? But she's determined that she's not tired (just like she's not stressed, she just had a tantrum at me and my dad again this morning when we failed to agree with her bonkers ideas about how empty the old house must be of all signs of human habitation). It's just one of those things!

She's been saying the most infuriating and also heartbreaking things about this. Some of it is straightforward ableism/healthism, but a lot of it sounds like the old adages of a people who pay extortionate prices for healthcare so resist going to the hospital if at all possible:

• "I know I didn't break it, because I can walk on it!"

• "I don't have a concussion because I don't have a headache!"

• And when I told her that people don't always have headaches with them: "Oh but I know I would get a headache right away." (Ma'am, I am a baseball fan so, thanks to Anthony Rizzo, we've all learned an important lesson lately about how you can tell right away whether you have a concussion!!! (Hint: you can't.))

• "It's no big deal, I just hit the corner a little [with the base of my skull!!!]"

This time I did say "if I told you I just hit my head a little on the corner of something, would you worry?" and she did admit that she would.

She's way more worried about her bad knee. I'm like People can have knee replacements! You can't have a brain replacement!

D just texted me to say it's just after midnight and time for bed.

It's about 21 hours since he had to get up to drive me to the airport. Luckily he went back to sleep (with Gary snuggles) after he got back home.

I'm at my parents' now, it's just after 6pm, I've spent the last four or so hours helping pack (ah the two genders: bubble-wrapping kitchen stuff and also helping my dad carry stuff too big and heavy for him to drag up from the basement himself).

I had a nap on the plane, but I have been awake most of those 21 hours. And thanks to the usual combination of my chronic insomnia and Gary, I got only two hours of broken sleep before that.

I feel fine now. Just kinda curious about what it's gonna be like when all this catches up with my bodymind.

( Finally one of those big processing-the-parental-visit entries that I knew was coming. )

Brains are funny. There's a song that's been stuck in my head for the last few days, since I started thinking about Loring Park and the cherry spoon, because it mentions them.

It's a song I used to hear on the radio when I was a teenager, by like a lounge-lizard kind of guy called Vic Volare, it's called "I'm Gonna Miss Minneapolis" and it's surprisingly easy to find online now. It just namechecks a lot of places. The Loring Bar Café closed a few years later and Bde Maka Ska is no longer named after a racist, but of course I went to Loring Park and the cherry spoon, and the top of the IDS still feels magical to me after my first memory of it as a kid which was seeing it enveloped in clouds and the idea that a building could be so tall that clouds were lower than it blew my tiny child mind.

Anyway, I mention all this because I too miss Minneapolis. After a leisurely morning of a shower for D, basically the same breakfast at the café we went to our first morning, and a little stroll in the warming morning air, we checked out of our hotel and went to pick up a rental car.

Our plan to go to the Mall of America today changed at the last minute when D graciously agreed to forgo it so I could have lunch with one of the people who hadn't been able to make it last night and who I had been most wanting to see here. They suggested a place near them and it was great. They also suggested a nearby co-op (one I'd heard of because I've read about The Co-op Wars!) when I said I wanted to buy veggie protein (basically, a can of lentils and some meat-analogues) to adapt my mother's cooking to suit me.

So we did that and then drove here. D did great at his "driving an automatic on the other side of the road" adventures. For most of the trip we listened to the Doof, streaming from his phone. Very weird to hear it on a sunny afternoon! Very weird to see the familiar sights of this particular stretch of freeway without them also being tied up with the feelings of being in a car with my parents. I'd literally never been able to decouple those, in all my life. I think I'll have more to say about this later; I don't have the energy for it now.

When we got here my parents were sitting on the front steps which is so weird, I've never seen them do that in their lives. Mom cried when she hugged me. I asked her if she was okay even though I knew and she said yes even though it was a lie; this is how we have to communicate.

We sat outside on the patio and chatted, Mom and I made spaghetti (I added the lentils to my sauce, Mom added hamburger and sausage to the rest after I insisted that we didn't all have to eat plain sauce, and D ate both on my instruction to model that meat-eaters can also eat non-meat and not cause a fuss about it), we drank a bottle of wine, I showed D around the farm, we all played cards a bit and everyone went to bed early.

Mom's talking about wanting to be out of this house before winter. It feels really real now. I hope I'll be able to say more about this soon, but for now I'm just having those Our Town feelings again: "I can't look at everything hard enough."

Brains are funny.