New Wood

So much has changed in such a few months. Mom moved into a retirement apartment in March and we’ve been getting her settled ever since. I finally decided to follow through with the knee replacements I’ve needed for years and had the first one in August. The left knee will be done three weeks from today.

I haven’t even thought of a blog entry since Mom moved, as I’ve adjusted to my new role of caregiver to an 82 year old parent with serious medical problems. But, we’ve made the transition successfully, or I should say, we continue to make it daily.

A friend asked me about writing some of the stories from her childhood home town and that triggered my response that I, too might have other things to say. This is a rich new phase of my life as my mother needs me, both challenging and rewarding, and there will be things I want to remember and share with my own children.

As I write, my husband is sanding an area in our dining room that was recently damaged by a broken water line in our kitchen. We managed to say the reclaimed heart pine floors that we purchased and put down four years ago. But the edges of the planks have cupped, leaving the surface uneven, with new scars next to the ones that we chose the flooring for in the first place. As he removes layers of polyurethane, raw wood is exposed, perfect at first glance. But a careful hand can sweep away the dust and sense the variations across the surface. And how will that “new wood” ever blend into the red hues of the rest of the floor again?

In many ways this is the story of the last six months – finding the areas of our lives to be fixed, one by one, sweeping away truths covered by the dust of time, exposing memory and promise, reconciling what was with what will be. We’re moving slowing, but ever more confidently, to something new.