27 August 2010
 
Season’s End


(Season’s End. Photo from Daniel Keys Fine Art 2010)
 
So flies the Summer. It is cool today, and the skies a wistful blue. The garage at work is lightly populated, which indicates the last vacation of the season is already in progress. Vendors are selling sunflowers in the Farmer’s market in the square in Ballston next to the Metro Station down the block.
 
Dad liked sunflowers before he transformed himself into Raven. I made a note to take some to the apartment in Potemkin Village next week and see if he remembers.
 
I wish I was headed there, to make sense of a proposal we are working through to meet an Air Force requirement, but instead I will be plunging across the District to help a struggling small business plead its case to the cognizant officials at the three-letter agency.
 
I forget why I agreed to do that; conceptually, I like acts of charity when I schedule them in the distant future but find them inconvenient when they actually arrive.
 
I got an e-mail from Jackie at Potemkin Village, who said the tagging device we were gong to attach to Raven had arrived late yesterday.
 
No word on whether the tagging device worked or not last night.
 
My sister said break-out attempts declined from five on Tuesday night to Two on Weds; I will be interested to see if the monitor worked. Mom apparently was exhausted- I don't know if she stayed up Wednesday night to try to corral Raven.
 
Anook said she looked as tired as she did two Thanksgivings ago before the heart event that laid her low at Christmas. She was placed on a drug called Coumadin, which she sometimes remembers to take.
 
It is a wonder drug, which is to say that sometimes it saves your life and sometimes it doesn’t, so you have to wonder.
 
I realize now that was the moment when things really started to unravel. Raven got out of the hospital waiting area and was headed somewhere in the snow before he was rescued by the guy who owns the hardware store. He took him to the door and ensured he was inside before motoring off under the baleful red eyes of the enormous Santa’s head that illuminates the side of the regional medical center.
 
He grabbed me when I walked into the store on a visit shortly thereafter and pushed me behind a display of plumbing fixtures and demanded to know what my plan was to prevent such events in the future.
 
I thanked him profusely for possibly saving Raven’s life and wondered how we would get to this moment in time.
 
Well, here it is.
 
Anook has a van and some large men coming to the house to pick up some of the furniture she will dispatch to her home in the Great White North. She has a list of things she has not been able to accomplish in the great cascade and is giving it to me.
 
She is pulling out of the Little Town by the Bay on Monday, the great work of the summer accomplished and Raven and Mom delivered to Potemkin Village.
 
This matter of the house is making us all a little queasy, I think, or at least it does me.
 
I remember crazy Aunt Rhoda’s house in An Arbor after her stroke. All of her stuff there just as it was, and my then-bride and I were just starting out and all of her stuff was available to furnish a new place. She was never coming back from her hospital bed, any more than Mom and Raven will, but looking at all that stuff, right down to the cases of canned corned beef on shelves in the basement, made me nervous.
 
We took a few pieces that day, but it didn’t feel right, but once the moment had passed, the bulk of the stuff just drifted off into the stream of second-hand dealers. I dreamed of Portobello Road in London the other night, the attic of the old empire where all the junk goes when their owners are gone. A hundred dealers with someone else’s china in the window, and trays of hundreds of slightly-used wedding rings.
 
We have to keep Raven and Mom’s house operational as a base while we are still rotating through, and will presumably use it for holiday entertaining for them while that is possible for the undetermined future.
 
Thanksgiving will be there, for sure, and I am committed to Christmas up there unless other contingencies arise. Stay flexible, that is my motto.
 
The winter is coming.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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