The Caregiver’s Tales: A Blog

It’s nineteen this morning with a light dusting of snow. Slightly peculiar weather for the Hill Country of Texas. Of course, we’ll take any sort of moisture the heavens decide to bring us even if it's in a more or less solid form. There’s also a strong north wind blowing which means wind chills and more cold air. I think the winter storm is scheduled to loosen its grip by the weekend, just in time for me to leave for Big Bend.

It was another day of mulching and mowing and yard work for me while trying to distance myself from the goings on in Washington D.C. Having convinced myself there’s nothing much I can do, having already voted, I had decided to let the big dogs eat and try to not watch or even comment. But I’m sensitive to the currents of history and I’m an interested citizen, so I look their way on occasion. Layoffs are the big news I see, and that’s interesting to me because I’ve laid off people before, and it was hard to do, especially because I delivered the news personally.

Life is funny. My great-grandmother, by whose house my house now stands, lived almost all of her life in this small Texas town where I now live. In fact, she died in the house next door while my youngest brother sat outside in 1968 and listened to his grandmother cry at the loss of her mother. It was the same year we lost our own mother. What a trying year for all. What’s strange to me, however, is that her husband, my great-grandfather, passed away in 1949, two years after my birth, and it felt to me as though he never existed. That he had lived and died in some long ago time. While it seemed my great-grandmother had lived for ages and had always been with me.