Not much going on so far today. It’s been a quiet and warm Saturday. Jesse stayed home last night, but who knows about tonight?

This morning Tom got clear plastic storage bins at Walmart. They’re nice. They’ll be great for both moving and storing stuff.

I can’t wait till next week! That’s when the benefits meeting is and he’ll know exactly what it’s going to cost. Then we’ll have a better idea of what we can look for in a rental.

We went out to Carl’s Jr. earlier, and a lizard ran into the kitchen as we were leaving. We managed to scare it back out.

Now we’re relaxing till we get to work on more moving preparations. We’re starting with the shed and sorting what we’re going to dump, sell and take with us. Well, he’s the one who’s mostly dealing with that. I’m not about to go hang out with the spiders and the bees and all that.

I started back up with the vitamins today, so hopefully I won’t feel so sluggish so often. I’m taking a couple of days off from running too, to let my knee heal. It’s not injured or anything, but I had a slight pain right above the kneecap on the left knee, so I’m giving it a break.

Still no word from Tammy. I thought I’d have an update from her by now, though I realize she’s only going to tell me what she wants me to know. And God knows how many things she tells me will even be true.

Later...

I was lying in bed in the pitch blackness of the night just relaxing to the sound of Tom snoring and vehicles on the distant highway. As I lay there I remembered waking up to pee late one night when I was around 7 or 8. My mother, who was always a night owl, had been watching TV on a tiny old black and white in the bedroom next to mine. I came out of the bathroom a few minutes later and she followed me as I returned to my bedroom and slunk down under the covers. I fumbled for a moment with the covers which she gently and lovingly tucked snugly around me. I was off to sleep again in no time.

Here I now sit over 40 years and 3000 miles later and I can’t help but wonder how. How could this same woman go on to slap the crap out of me, not too often, but enough to make sure I’d never forget it? How could she have taunted me about my weight when I spent 95% of my youth thin? How could she have said some of the cruel things she said to me? How could she have sent me away just so she could have a quieter household? How could she have refused her own daughter’s pleas to come back home as I cried and begged on the phone and in letters? My happiness was in her hands for decades like a piece of paper. But she took that piece of paper and squeezed it in her fist so tight until it crumbled to nothing.

How is it possible for me to feel the empathy I feel for her for what she’s going through right now after the recent loss of her husband of 62 years? How is it possible to retain at least some love for her as she suffers the rest of her life in loneliness, is left alone to deal with her health problems, and then eventually dies? I mean I suppose sooner or later either Tammy will take her in or she’ll go live in some nursing home or some type of assisted living program, but how can I feel any pity for this negative, domineering witch who basically already has one foot in the grave? When you think about it, it’s just a waiting game from here on out. She could live another 5-10 years, but under the circumstances, would most people feel all that blessed about that?

Yet while I don’t know that I ever can or will fully forgive my mother any more than some people in Arizona or God Himself, I do feel a stab of pity, however slight it may be. I know that despite the many times we’ve butted heads in life, my sister would understand my mixed emotions, not that being understood really matters. I know how I feel and that’s good enough for me. I let myself feel what I feel even if I don’t always like what I feel.

Well, I’m not as sensitive to cruel words as I was as a child, she would never slap me now, and I’m still “thin” for a 46-year-old woman barely brushing the 5-foot marker, but she can never ever hurt me again. She can never really hurt me again. Yeah, that’s the one thing I realize as I compare the past to the present and that’s that even in my utmost toughest of times as an adult, life is always better than it was for me as a child. The only thing worse about it is that there have been moments in adulthood in which I feared for my survival due to the poverty that my mother will never have even the slightest inkling of a taste of no matter how many more years the old witch has left in her.