Damn, I miss my parents.
I've been bing-watching Last Tango in Halifax on Amazon Prime streaming. (Where are the American series like this? See Lisa at Privilege for a more intellectual analysis.) I loved every minute of it. Can't wait for Season 3 but suspect we in the colonies will be seeing it sometime later than the Brits.
Whilst I watched, I noticed that the Grande Dame Ann Reid was reminding me of my mother. I can't put my finger on it. Something to do with her clothes, her expressions, an Empress sympatico. This led me into reflecting that my family barely has 2 "elders" around and I really, really miss having someone in polyester pants and a plastic tote bag come over to visit and bring me a box of Entenmann's chocolate chip cookies.
November both excites and makes me melancholy. I become unreasonably anticipatory about pies and the smell of turkey roasting. I feel the need to make things with pumpkin. I decide to put the dining room table in the living room so we can all fit. Mr. Pom ignore me.
At the same time, I gaze mournfully at my mother's yellow enamel "lasagna pan" in which she probably made lasagna once and corn pudding every Thanksgiving. The yellow enamel pan with the practical metal slip on handle frame suddenly represents all I miss about her, about her generation and the generation before her.
My memories are many-layered, like lasagna.
You knew that was coming, right?
So today, November 2nd, All Souls Day makes me miss the familial souls. I didn't go to the cemetery because I was there during the week. I picked up dog crap deposited on MY MOTHER'S GRAVE with two wide hosta leaves, but it was a ver unpleasant experience. Seriously, why are there dogs in the cemetery. I assumed it was dog crap but as I picked up the disgustingness, I thought maybe it was a racoon or a huge, sick squirrel? Anyway, right in the middle of my MOTHER'S GRAVE??
I then snaked my Subaru through the tiny, crazy 90 degree turns of the one cemetery that leads into the other and go visit my mom's parents and sister. Once again, I promise them that I will bring a clipper for the damn pine tree that their next-grave neighbors planted and now encroaches on their headstone. Yes, I can hear them muttering to each other 6 feet below: "Is anyone going to clip this?Why did they allow them to plant this here? She says she's going to clip it next time, but does she??"
We only grow more like ourselves in death.
I promise next time!
I did not do the great grandparents and godmother grave tour as that is reserved for days of complete melancholy-I-am-an-orphan. And when I pulled up, someone from work called me and I was blastedly pissed to be standing graveside talking about a case. Why did I pick up? I am stupid.
My parents's are buried in my father's family plot, which lies between two above ground mausoleums. Legend is that my paternal grandmother intended to have a mausoleum built, but his sisters KO'd it for the cost, and instead put up a very large, very lovely and elegant headstone, complete with bas relief sculpture and Latin inscription.
Unfortunately, that means that Mom and Dad end up with a flat "footstone", so if we want to plant Lilies of the Valley, my mother's favorite flower, then we have to do it up by the headstone and not by their flat tablet cause nothing is allowed to be planted there (except a dog pile apparently).
I don't recall visiting the cemeteries on All Souls Day when I was a kid. My mother talked about marizpan in the shape of bones that they would get at the baker. Damn, I missed all the good ghouly Italian stuff. The cemetery visit after church was the Palm Sunday ritual.
My motherand her family are buried exactly halfway between the house in which she was born and the house they moved to when she got married. My grandmother lived within one mile of her homes her entire life and now can keep on eye on both. This year, the last of her generation died, my Aunt Anne, who was my grandmother's youngest brother's wife. After my great grandparents died, that brother bought the house where my great grandparents, grandmother, and her sister and her family lived. Aunt Anne was the last of them and she died in the house. If you drive past, you can see the pink roses on the chain link fence that my great grandmother planted probably 60 years ago.
I miss that continuity. I take nothing for granted these days in terms of my own children and their homes.
I woke up very tired today after a Saturday of cleaning and purging. I finally have a sock drawer that doesn't explode with unmated socks when you try to pull it open. It was cold and sunny and windy today and I spent the morning painting in my journal. Then we bought cold cuts and drove to The New Mom's house so Mr. Pom could help the SIL hang a mirror and other things.
The baby was sleepy and quiet, too. He only talked to me for a few minutes, content to sit and watch the Jets get slaughtered for awhile. Though he didn't carry on a conversation, he did do "flirty eyes' in which he raises his eyebrows and grins and expresses more than his grunts and intonations can say.
And when he got kinda cranky and didn't know if he wanted to sleep, nurse, or watch TV in his swing, we gracefully left to go Trader Joe's, grab Starbucks and come home and roast a chicken.
Tomorrow is my parents' wedding anniversary. They would have been married 68 years. I hope they are going out to eat with everyone and there's better be a sponge cake with whipped cream frosting, hand-turned roses, and slivered almonds on the side after that.
I'm going to bake something pumpkin.