More on Woman-Against-Mice
I was falling asleep at the keyboard yesterday evening, so I came right home without heading to the West Side to police my mother’s mousetraps and set new ones. So I haven’t been there since Wednesday. I’m considering going over there tonight, but my husband is leaving town tomorrow.
“Well,” I remarked over the phone, “maybe you can pick up a few more of the standard wooden ones over the weekend; we’re out.”
“Oh, sure,” she told me. “I have a Home Depot that’s very nearby.”
So, you see: I’m still worth lying to. I got that going for me.
Kitchens; Some Like ‘Em Clean . . . And, Sibling Rivalry
One of the most frustrating aspects of this situation is that I happen to like cleaning off my mother’s countertop when I drop by her house, but that requires washing dishes. Yet her kitchen faucet is broken, so I have to wash them in the little back bathroom; she doesn’t really like me doing that, either.
I have no control over this woman’s actions, and as long as she has the dog my brother won’t throw his weight behind my idea that she ought to move to my side of town—because he doesn’t want her to spend the money in dog-proofing another yard, and/or because he believes that Mandy’s chewing habit will continue, and she’ll simply chew up another house. But, of course, a lot of the damage he’s seeing is from the old days, when Mandy was under a year old—a puppy in a big-dog body.
And the last time I saw him doing physical work to pick up after my mother was in the mid-1990s, when she left the condominium, moved into one of her houses, and refused to retrieve her stuff from the condominium. Of course, she didn’t pay the power bill, so the meat in her fridge and freezer became host to a huge variety of maggots. I was working a job-job at the time; Allen blew in one weekend to work on clearing some of the clutter from that place, and I did the rest myself, over the course of a few months: including the rotten meat and the maggots. I worked every Saturday for months and months. I got the place cleared out, repaired, painted, and rented out to a set of tenants. I joined the HOA on that building and dealt with all of the nasty personalities my mother had eventually just fled.
As we were sorting through the rubbish at the condominium, Allen said it was just like the fun we’d have when she died, throwing away endless mountains of stuff that mostly should have been given away or junked. “Except that in this instance, she’s around to tell us how she’s doing it wrong.”
Au contraire: she was seven blocks away for that one, and unable to supervise. This crisis is taking place in her very own home, and she can stand over us and coach from the sidelines. Except that “us” mostly means “me.” I’ll never feel guilty about borrowing money from either of them ever again. I think.
“Can’t We Skip Ahead to the Fun Stuff?” Kitchen Remodeling and Landscaping
Unless I can keep her occupied looking up kitchen-remodeling tips every single time I drop by. I wonder what the current “in” material is. I remember Corian, and marble, and granite, and poured concrete. But the architecture/interior design magazine hasn’t been able to afford me in a good six months, so I’m a bit behind the times. If we could just raise the level of that one counter, it would help enormously: it’s at child-table height, so it’s increasingly impossible for food-prep purposes as my mother ages. Simply having that one item rebuilt— without tackling any of her more grandiose notions about remodeling— would make that kitchen more usable, and maybe motivate her to take care of the house a bit better.
Green Remodeling; Green Landscaping
What is everyone’s favorite home-improvement magazine? Or favorite sources on low-water-use landscaping techniques? What has everyone heard about that new generation of fake grass—the stuff that is supposed to be “beyond Astroturf”? (That would be lovely in the front yard, in terms of getting the neighbors off of her case; it would also be terrific in a dog run.)
I guess I’d better either spring for that 50-foot Cat 5 cable, or install her new wireless modem/router, too. Presumably a lot of the best material on all of these issues is to be found on the internets.
These crises always unfold while I’m working full-time. And that, ironically, is good: it’s a lot harder to address the affects of my mother’s depressions when I am not depressed myself. Also, it’s better when I have a few bucks to put into things like mousetraps, spackle, and longer computer cables.
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