Journal 130 Now, onto Sunday

My first thoughts as my eyes popped open this morning, at precisely 9:28 am, at my mom's house, were as follows:
holy cr*p my mother has to move in 4 days;
and
I have so much work to do;
(both literally, ie, work-work, and figuratively, ie, life-work, moving-my-mom-work, closing-a-house-work; which entails visiting the lawyer, re-confirming the movers, helping to box up belongings, the belongings that belong to a house long-lived-in, twenty-plus years lived in, and boil them down into something that will fit into a one-bedroom Beach apartment, without causing an emotional riptide).

I know. And I wasn't even OUT of the bed yet. 
I spent the next half-hour in bed, reading, (re: hiding from the day) and then reluctantly I got up.
Went downstairs.
My mother was in the basement.
I surveyed the boxes on the main floor with the eye of a practiced mover (I moved over five times in my twenties and I know that fluttery feeling that starts to happen in the days leading up to a move--it's anticipation, sure, but it's also the thought that {for me} all of one's wordly goods are packaged in cardboard and the 'where-is-the-certain-something' I was looking for that I need desperately, right now?).

I spent the next hour touring the house with my mom, room by room, a reconaissance mission, going through the adage I always use (my voice raising a bit with each unfinished room): "when in doubt, throw it out."

It's not that easy. I do know this.  To me, it is all just stuff, it always just is, perhaps it's the interior designer in me, the minimalist, that scorns the idea of holding on to material things--interiors are always changing, spaces are fluid, and spaces beget other spaces.
But it's not like that for my mom, especially right now. Her eyes, looking blankly past me after we finished up in the living room were eyes that were not in the here and now. They were somewhere else,
looking into the past, where my father was still with her, where he would have helped organize this, make some sense of it, go to a new place with her.
I realized this, thank God, just in time.
Went out. Got in the car. Drove to Starbucks. Brought back coffees.  Sat at the kitchen table, the same one where I used to sit with her late at night after my Keg shifts when I was twenty, twenty-one, still living at home, and talked about life, talked about nothing, talked about everything.

It's hard for me to leave this house (again) too.