friday into saturday

There's no place like home. I have clicked my Ruby slippers together and here I am. We have no plans for the weekend, and it is my mission to keep it that way. If I make it to Winko, that will be the only big outing for me.

I guess it is the changing weather, the cooling of the earth, that pulls me into myself. I love autumn. or

It could be the new blood pressure medication. I really got yelled at this week. My doctor, a Chinese man who never works on the thirteenth of any month, tells me in broken English: you must take care of your heart and your kidneys. You may feel fine now, (I do) but it won't last. Fine. Nothing lasts anyway. But I filled the prescriptions and I am taking them. I am a little woozy if I stand up fast, but that is to be expected. Plus, me and woozy go way back. I used to spin and spin in circles out in my front yard until I tipped over and would spin and spin some more. I loved spinning. It was a bad sign. Then I found spinning in a bottle, oh, and spin the bottle. But that's another story.

I take care of, let's call her Ella. It isn't her name. Her daughter's name isn't Margaret Victoria either, but we'll call her that. MV for short. So every night, MV shows up to heal her mother who is 95 and not in need of much. Certainly not healing, but the daughter finds great purpose in hovering and feeding and clucking and cooing and referring to herself in the third person which drives me fucking mad. She sings to her mother at the top of her lungs. And she has furnished Ella's room with more rose and burgundy flowered fabric than I've seen since the mid eighties. Moving her mother has become increasingly difficult, and MV insists that her mother can stand and walk and dance and of course no one sees this but her because after all, she's a healer. And we just don't know what we're doing. We worker bees. We lowly serfs. And now I have, in my wisdom, insisted she provide a mechanical lift to haul Ella's considerable ass in and out of bed. Bless Ella. It isn't her fault. But wait! It could be her fault. She IS the mother after all, and if you've ever been a mother, you know by now that it is mostly all your fault. Ask my son.

So I ordered the lift and Ella will be hydraulically suspended as we swing her from one place to the next, and MV can sing her heart out, but the girls won't break their backs.

It is such hard work.