why I am holding a mop, why my sister is making a face

My sister and I have been hanging out at my Mom's place since Thursday. On Thursday morning she went in to the hospital to have a lung resection to remove some mystery lump they found when she was getting medical work done for another mystery lump elsewhere. The good news is she doesn't have cancer in her lymph nodes and they said they may never know if it's cancer or not. The good news is she's recovering nicely. The good news is that my sister is one of the people I'd most want to be with when I was in the middle of an emotionally trying time, especially if it was family related, and she's the one I'm with. The picture above is one of a series of photos we took to cheer my Mom up, basically re-creations of photos taken in the same house 30 years ago. She laughed until she had to put the pictures down, which we branded a success. She doesn't mind being a patient as much as I mind her being a patient. She shoos us out of the hospital in the evening.

My Mom is in the ICU where she has been since the surgery but the ICU label is deceptive. She's alert and awake and feeling okay, just sore, bored and cranky. In fact she's always felt fine, through the month of dealing with the "what do we do about the mystery lump?" discussion, and now she feels lousy. She should be moved to the normal patient wing sometime soon. Then she'll come home. She lives alone so my sister and I are coordinating with neighbors and other family members to take care of cats, mail, phone calls and whatever else her life entails, which we're learning as we go. I know I have a place to go back to in Vermont, but the difference between feeling at home there and at home here is really striking.

It's been weird. I haven't been in my Mom's house without her -- the house I grew up in and where I lived for about 15 years -- since high school. I haven't been here with my sister for any extended period of time in maybe 20 years. Coming back to the town I grew up in, where I've visited but not really lived, has been an experience. The town was on its way out of being a farming town when I lived here, it's now firmly a tony Boston suburb. The people in the supermarket look bizarre to me. The traffic is ridiculous. And yet, the house is still totally quiet at night. The place where I took swimming lessons is now a nature preserve where Kate and I went hiking. The hospital where I was born and later worked in high school, has wifi and some darned nice ICU nurses.

I haven't told almost anyone about all of this because I have no idea how to bring it up. After someone says "How are you?" do they really want to hear "Oh my Mom's in the ICU..." Some people do, and some people I've told. Some people I didn't tell until I had to and felt weird not telling them earlier. Some people I gave loose outlines "a family member... a medical problem" and didn't know how specific to be. I haven't written about it on my main blog because my Mom reads it -- though she's not reading it now -- and I know she'll be critical of whatever I write, we have that sort of relationship. I have a hard time figuring out how to behave here, it's been nice to hang out with my sister who doesn't care how I act.

I'll go back to Vermont, and then head out to North Dakota for a library talk in a few days. I have no plan, and it's unusual for me to have no plan. I'm not sure what to say, and that's pretty unusual for me as well. This is a start.