Sunday Serenity - The Andy Griffith Show Theme Song

Listen to this three or four times in a row and try to stay glum.  Can't be done.

Last Sunday I went to my husband Ed's apartment in Kelso to retrieve the things I'd left there over the last two years of Sunday visits and occasional weekend overnights.  We had the conversation that ended our 41.5 year marriage.  Not a serene Sunday.  No Sir.  (for the backstory see these three poems in this order: Piles of Painted Echoes and My Heart is the Lake of Fire and Who Am I Without You? )

This weekend my Mom resumed her weekend visits with my brother's family in Portland OR.  Even before she left Friday afternoon I'd already started covering her bed with the contents of the back-and-forth-bags and the plastic dresser I'd brought home last Sunday.  I added to all that the clean clothes that had accumulated from the laundry over several weeks and other wardrobe items that were not stowed in their homes.  

Contributing to the disorder was the habit I'd developed of using items out of the travel bags and stowing clean clothes back in them or piling them on top.  It generated a sense of being neither her nor there.  Along with a deep sense of homelessness.

Before midnight Friday I'd cleared Mom's bed of the first pile having bestowed order upon my wardrobe, accessories and personal items.  Not perfect yet but getting there. I set up so I can continue to sort and organize smaller containers during the week Mom is home without covering her bed.  

I did not rest on my laurels.  I immediately began a new pile on her bed.  This time of craft paraphernalia from the room across the hall which is my office/crafting room.  It has been the same situation there with the back-and-forth bags and boxes of crafts and writing stuff including electronics.  This was a more complex project and took me until late this afternoon to get Mom's bed cleared. There was a lot of going back and forth between the rooms and in the end I've established a similar situation in which I can do fine-tune sorts of smaller containers without commandeering Mom's bed.  At least not for more than a few hours in the afternoon.

The irony did not escape me that with Mom returning to Portland for the first weekend since the shelter-in-place regimen began in mid March I might have been schlepping those bags over for our first sleep-over in three months but instead I'm busy unpacking, sorting, organizing and stowing all manner of stuff: Clothes, crafts, health-and-beauty aids, electronics, books, office/writing paraphernalia -- along with thoughts, feelings and memories.

Since I only have the stamina to stay active about an hour at a time I took sit-down breaks to crochet and/or watch videos.    Altho there have been a few others I've been nearly bingeing on Season 1 of The Andy Griffith Show.  Since this is a show that aired during my childhood and Ron Howard who played Sheriff Andy's son is only 3.5 years older than me this is a total nostalgia kick.  

It is also helping me to remember who I was before I became who I am and grounding me in my own history and memories.  In other words it is helping me find hope that there is a viable 'after' a devastating ending of a 41.5 year marriage.  I may have lost my best friend but I have not, as I half expected to discover, lost myself.