My sister cracks me up. Yesterday she emailed me saying she couldn't believe she'd had no response to the spinach story. She did the phone equivalent of sending the story to my yahoo account (which I seldom check), which is calling my cell phone (which I almost never turn on). So I turned on my cell to check my messages.
"I'm not even home yet and she's already making me crazy. This morning the phone rang at eight o'clock and it was her and I couldn't understand her before staggering into the living room where I have better reception. I asked her what she had to call me at the crack of hell about, and she got all flustered and said, 'Well, now I've forgotten.' But then she remembered that her spinach crop is so bountiful this year that I can take as much of it as I want. So she's waking me up three days before I go home to tell me I can have spinach."
Reportedly it's been soggy in New England this June and jumped from cold and wet to hot and wet. I am so glad I plan to go home in September, when the weather (barring hurricanes) is more dependable. Our father's home this week too though. Our mother's throwing a Father's Day picnic for her husband this year, and I don't know how my sister plans to juggle seeing our actual father on Father's Day with our mother's expectations about seeing her husband. If I lived near both sets of parents and I saw my notstepmother on Mother's Day instead of my actual mother, the hurt would be vast and percussive--and justified. I wonder whether my mother can make the parallel.
CLH left a postscript in a second message: "If it's all right with you, when I tell her how irritating the spinach thing was I am also going to tell her how inappropriate of her it was to inquire about the state of the gate-leg table during the turmoil of your house falling over into a swamp. 'They ripped off the leaves and are using them as flotation devices in the swampy areas.'"
Me, I fume until I snap, because I find trying to communicate to her the source of my bad feeling and her role in it so frustrating. More frustrating than fuming and snapping? I'm not sure.
(And yes, my mother did so inquire. She called me on my birthday, which was nice of course, and I told her I wasn't in a particularly birthday mood because of the uncertain state of the house. I told her about taking everything out of the furnace room to so we could see the whole thing, and calcium sulfates, and type 5 concrete, and the crystalline structure, and the cracking of the floor, and the disintegration of the support column behind the furnace. She asked, "Now where is the gateleg table in all this?" RDC and I have considered living in Blake's cage or maybe the garage if the house goes. Silly us, not to consider the primacy of the table.)
My sister works fast. I called my mother's house to tell her about the shocking new development (that I cooked) and to be told that the only reason I don't take more readily to this innate female skill is that RDC forcibly keeps me out of the kitchen, and also to talk to my sister, now home for the weekend.
My mother asked about the house and I told her what I told her before, about fixing the drainage and supporting the porch beam and replacing the columns. This time I was able to tell her that RDC was, as we spoke, routing a plank to fit under the porch beams, a nice manly activity I expected she would appreciate, to keep the porch roof up, and she asked, very solicitously, if it was actually falling down. "No, but it would if we didn't fix it." She was all concern this time, unlike last, and I knew CLH had already spoken to her.
Our mother passed the phone to my sister, who (after leaving her earshot) filled me in on lunch with our father (new malapropisms: "cosmatose" for "comatose," as in drinking to the point of, though whether anyone actually had a cosmopolitan I doubt, and "shitake," which is the sort of wave created in the pool when his apparently overweight notstepdaughterinlaw jumps in) and so forth.
I asked CLH how she'd broached the table topic, since it was obvious she had. "Well, I told her you were a little offended [note: amused enough to tell CLH, since any slight mother-error becomes story fodder] that that was her question when you told her about the house. She said, 'Well, I was concerned about the table,' so I pointed out that you were telling her about the house and she was concerned about a piece of furniture."
I know dwelling is unhealthy. But laughing about it, even if we're not quite to laughing it off, has to be good for us, right?