I love my nephew.

And also I can feel my mom starting to get pissed about me posting that last photo, so I needed to get something else up. (She thought it wrong to even take a picture of someone wearing oxygen.) Because I can't seem to words together put nicely, my cute little Benny Boy will have to do for the moment.

Also, here is a link to a great post on my friend Amy's blog. Amy is a fairy of a human being.

Stay tuned: Depressing blog post of the year coming soon! Starring Brain Cancer, My Dad and Sally Field! Get the hankies!

Happy Thanksgiving, all you loves.

It was a Good Night, Mama.

My mom would be sooo pissed that I am posting this picture. But I LOVE it! And would do anything to have her hand on my face right now. So, if you want me to take it down, Ma, you better show yourself to me somehow and say so! Otherwise, it's staying! You hear me, Gigi!

A year ago today I spent the last day I ever would with my mom. Having been up since 3am that morning---we had tea and split an English muffin in the middle of the night; our final tea party---we talked about how we wanted to nap the day away together. She’d stay on her couch, which she barely moved from in those last days, and I would take the hospital bed, she said. But things happened---a few visitors came, I had to try two different pharmacies and fight construction traffic to pick up a refill of liquid morphine, and relatively unremarkable hours of the day passed us by. By then I had the morphine administering down. Its conversion from grams to ounces, its equivalent dose in Oxycontin. I would fill the dropper, sometimes twice, and if it was a good day, my mom would get relief. This was not her worst day. Had it been, there would have been no visitors---even daughters---welcome.

There was no reason to suspect it was the last day of her life. Except for maybe every reason. We all thought we had longer. We were waiting for the stuff of comas and catheters and while I'm so grateful it didn’t get to that, those were the markers we were waiting for. Because they never came, we were all shocked.

It’s still light out so I haven’t died yet today. When it gets dark lately, I die a little and cry on my couch and wish I could just be asleep and unfeeling. I downloaded Little Women to watch tonight--- the movie my mom, Cherie and I watched this night last year. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to watch it or if I even want to. I’ve never felt so unsure of what I want or how to be. Settled in this pain or afloat in distraction?

Outside myself. Away from me.

We ate Halloween candy. My mom’s appetite had returned and though she couldn’t walk, or sleep lying down, or breathe without oxygen flowing at its highest setting into her nostrils, we saw her appetite as a sign of improvement.

You see what you can.

I told her I loved her. See, I didn’t know but somewhere I knew.

I slept on the hospital bed that night. She stayed on her couch. Around 3am I woke up, startled and surprised that we hadn’t been up yet in the night together. I brought all my blankets with me to the couch and sat beside her and covered us both. She was alive. I made sure our skin touched. Our arms. The outside of our thighs. I rubbed her back and neck. I didn't know. Somewhere I knew.

The sun is already west. Our day together nearly gone.

My head on her shoulder, I held her hand. She was barely awake and I suppose barely alive, but we held hands.

We took our nap together then.

And Now For Something Completely Different.

Just two years ago...on a planet far, far away from the one I'm on now.

I can't remember if I ever posted this, but I just stumbled across it and it gave me a deep (and deeply needed) laugh. Mattie came to NH for a visit a couple of falls ago and this is the kind of shit we get into when we're together. All editing credit goes to Mattie. Dirty Chirl (sister #4) is on camera duty and Katie (sister #3) is on commentary. Bec (sister #2) provided the backyard and I'm sure Tara (sister #1) called at some point that day. I'm in charge of gravity (though some might argue Mattie had some responsibility there as well).

Let's all get a laugh at my expense, shall we?

P.S. Don't we all think Mattie should come back to the 'shire again soon so he can cheer me up and we can make more fun videos?

(Can I get away with the 'shire? I mean, can I?)

And fall used to be my favorite time of year...

I’m enjoying a spiced pumpkin latte right now at my usual coffee shop. I haven’t been here in weeks, wanting to be mostly home these days. Even a coffee shop feels chaotic and overwhelming lately.

I sat in this exact seat last year when I returned to New Hampshire after spending October 10th to November 5th in Rhode Island. Only a couple of days after my mom died.

The crisp air brought sorrow this year. I hadn’t expected it to hit me this early but the wind changed and my body understood its meaning before my mind did. A limbic brain remembering the chilling fear that came with the chilling air; the falling hearts with the falling leaves. The anniversary of her dying is hitting before the anniversary of her death.

I am slipping into darkness, I can feel it.

Let me say this: I have safety nets in place. Medication. Therapy. Dan.

Still a sadness cloaks me so completely that I sometimes experience a sense of almost amnesic displacement---Who am I? Where am I? What am I to do? It's worst at night, of course.

I look for her everywhere. When Dan and I drive through new towns, I expect to see her walking out of stores. Like she’s hiding out and not gone. I found an old cell phone recently and when it worked and I saw that there were messages from her, I thought that I had found her. She’s been writing to me here this whole time! My heart swelled and deflated so quickly that it was in sharp pain, like when you turn your neck too quickly in a way it's not meant to go. My heart won't ever know my mom in the same way and it is straining to catch a glimpse of her.

I am looking out this coffee shop window now, hoping to catch that glimpse. I am imagining spotting her across the street and watching her look both ways before crossing towards me. Sneakers. Her brown felt coat. Her purse strap across her chest. Smiling. Laughing and waving to the drivers who let her pass. Beaming as her eyes meet mine in this window. “Here I am,” she’d say. “Here I am, my Laura.”

I can picture this so vividly---I understand now why they put these sorts of scenes in movies---that I am crying in this shop now, my face down and covered with my hand.

The memories of last October are haunting me. The fear. She began sleeping sitting up, falling asleep mid-sentence. Sometimes she woke not quite herself, speaking words that didn't make sense and scared because she was aware of it. I would tell her to ride it out, to not worry if she didn't make sense. Her fear haunts me most.

So, I'm not sure how much I'll be writing this month or even during the coming holidays. When I do write lately it's about these memories that keep flashing through me, in feelings if not pictures. The 911 calls, holding her hand through panicked, insufficient breaths---I'm not sure I can share those here. I mean just how much of a downer can this blog be? But maybe I'll want to. Hard to know anything for certain these days.

Who am I? Where am I? What am I to do?

Lots of laundry and cleaning and even cooking. Sometimes moving seems the only option. Sometimes not.

Which isn't to say there aren't moments of levity. My mom was laughing the night before she died and taught us how to always find the crumbs of joy even in times of famine.

The other night Dan painted my toenails in the most beautiful act of just being there that I have ever witnessed or experienced.

Modern Family has me laughing hysterically every Wednesday night. (Dan and I started this comfortable little tradition of watching it from bed because 9pm seems a reasonable---if not late---bedtime lately.)

I've had two nice lunches with my sisters and dad in the last week.

And then there's the wonderful warmth of this spiced pumpkin latte.

My mom would be glad for all of this. Still, particularly on rainy days like this one, I only wish she and I were watching a Lifetime movie in her family room, both of us falling asleep after having been up all night like we were last year. Even at its worst, I loved just sitting with her.

Sometimes when I close my eyes for a nap it feels like she is in the room with me.

My dad's health is uncertain to say the least and saying the least is what he'd prefer I do, a choice I understand and will honor. My family is in a sad transition of trying to relearn who we are to each other within the context of this broken version of our family.

It's just hard. Like I said, I hadn't expected it this early but then nothing has been as I anticipated.

She would love the orange leaves. She would love this rain.

And I would love her loving them.

This is where I am. Who I am. And there's nothing to be done other than acknowledging it is so.

How satisfying is this?

I should be embarrassed, shouldn't I be?

But I'm not. I look at this and feel a really ridiculous amount of pride. We don't even have pets or kids! What would your sludge pot look like? Perhaps I could make a business of doing sludge pot readings.

My Mama's Rainbow is back and all cleaned up and purty and yesterday it had its first romp around the apartment. So...much...hair. Also, spiders. Our apartment is where daddy longlegs come to winter. This is extremely unsettling for those of us in this apartment who are certain that spiders mess with sleeping humans for sport.

I am cracked up by the amount of Rainbow loyalists that I've heard from since posting this. I feel I've tapped into some type of underground cleaning society. Perhaps we should all meet up and cross hoses.

So, apparently vacuum sales are born, in large part, from leads generated by users. For instance, when I told Brian that my sister mentioned hating her Kirby, he suggested I talk her into having him to her house for a 45-minute free demonstration on the latest model (which is apparently Rosie-from-The-Jetsons-good). I told him I'd see what I could do. This being my "public forum," I am mentioning it here because somewhere in my heart I feel this is an old-school good deed during hard economic times.

If anyone wants a Rainbow demonstration (I can't believe I'm writing this), let me know and I'll contact Brian to give him your info. Full disclosure: If I get him two demonstrations---without anyone purchasing a thing---I get a free Rainmate which is an air purifier that sounds like the porn version of Rain Man. I don't really need an air purifier but the idea of winning something is always delightful.

Did I mention that Dan has suffered from asthma since he was a young child.

I know Brian will travel anywhere in New Hampshire, which I assume means he'll likely cross a New England state border or two. Did I also mention that, "The Rainbow is certified asthma & allergy friendly™ by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America*."

So it's sexy too!

IF YOU CALL NOW, I'LL EVEN THROW IN THIS LIGHTLY USED PLUNGER!

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

I'm really not trying to break into the vacuum business here but I told Brian I would do my part and now I've done it.

Today Dan and I are going on a Target/Christmas Tree Shop field trip. Welcome mats, throw pillows, storage totes, oh my! I woke up excited about it which I find a bit depressing. Maybe we'll even have lunch at the Target food counter!

Vacuum referrals and weekend trips for household wares---it's all feeling very domestic around here. We'll have to have sex in a movie theater tonight to prove to ourselves that we're still a childless couple in our prime.

Or, we could take turns throwing random crap on the rug and vacuuming it up to see what it looks like in the Rainbow's water tank.

Tough call.

And now I'm in Dublin with a broken heart

It’s 2011 and I just had a vacuum repairman in my living room on a Sunday morning. (Dan and I keep calling him the Hoover-Fixer-Sucker-Guy and singing the song from Once.)

He was here to assess my mom’s Rainbow. Just “My Rainbow” to her. It had been making an awful high-pitched noise and there was a terrible smell of burning last time I used it so I wanted to get it a tune-up. Since the shop is an hour away and he lives here in town, Brian, a third-generation vacuum repairman whose father owns the place, offered to come out and have a look. A new hose and some basic clean-up and the machine should be good as new.

Anyone who knew my mom well understood that this vacuum was her most valued possession. She never cared for cars or furs but---with five long-haired daughters and various cats, dogs, and litters of puppies along the years---a good vacuum was important to her. She would extoll the virtues of her Rainbow to anyone who was in the market for a new vacuum. So effusive was she, that the Rainbow representatives who came out to our house to repair or upgrade her models over the years asked her to work for the company.

The Rainbow, an R2-D2-looking thing, locked into a water basin which sat on a wheeled ring on which you dragged the whole apparatus. There was a long, elephant’s trunk of a hose and various wands and attachments for dusting and upholstery and crevices but the water basin was what gave my mom her sense of vacuum superiority. There was no risk of all the dirt and hair and dust and bugs she sucked up erupting out of an over-filled bag. The spiders were dead. The dust was drenched. It all whirled in a cyclone around the basin so at the end you were rewarded with a gruel of dark water and sludge.

As a kid I was mostly just annoyed with the noise of it. If I was watching TV, the sound of the vacuum's wheels hitting the linoleum as my mom turned the corner from the dining room to the kitchen sparked irritation in me, aware of the impending interruption that would occur when she reached the family room. It was loud and it was cumbersome and I got annoyed whenever I was asked to schlep it from one part of the house to another.

Schlep it, not run it. She preferred to do the vacuuming herself than have us break her machine. You could borrow her sweater and stain it, you could shatter her favorite pitcher and my mom would have laughed. But I was scared of breaking her Rainbow. I once asked her if I could bring it up to NH to give my apartment a solid cleaning (the kind an electric broom just couldn’t handle), and though she let me, I saw a hesitation on her face that I had never before seen when I had asked to borrow anything. Of course before I could take it anywhere, I was first subjected to her Rainbow orientation speech which stressed, above all, the importance of not leaving the water basin attached after you’ve finished as condensation in the engine would prove fatal.

Thinking of her ambivalence now, I love it. I almost wish she would have told me no.

It wasn’t until last year when I was vacuuming her house every week that I finally understood the machine’s greatness, its efficiency and power. When I told her the floor attachment kept coming off she was stern----“That’s because you’re not putting it on right”---before showing me how to do it. It was a simple fix, you just had to know the machine. I took pride in the fact that I knew how to do it right. That she knew I knew. She was as grateful that I was cleaning her home as she was that I was respecting her machine.

She laughed when she saw me detach the water basin even just to take a bathroom break.

When she started losing her hair, I vacuumed twice a week if I could. The hair would amass in broad, thick webs on the couch cushions and floor and I tried to keep up with it all, protective of her pride. Once, after the hospice nurse had just been to the house, I eyed a small hair nest on the rug and grabbed it up with my hand, trying to be nonchalant about it so she wouldn’t see.

“Was that hair?” she said, missing nothing, and then she asked if I thought the nurse had seen it.

The day she died, after making arrangements at the funeral home, we came home to the family and friends who were still at the house and my mom’s hospital bed was gone, the furniture back in place, the floor vacuumed. The gesture was meant in kindness but I was disarmed by how gone it all made her. I missed even the threads of her scattered on the floor. Whenever I visited the house in the months following her death, I wished that I had vacuumed less and I would scour the rugs and floor, even around the toilet, hoping to find a little web of her hair.

Before she died, she told me she wanted me to have the vacuum, knowing I was the only one of her daughters who didn’t have a good one. But she had said this to only me and when my sister was moving into the house to help my dad out, it didn’t seem right to say anything or take it when there was still all that house to clean. My sister gave me her Kirby to use knowing I didn't have a solid vacuum.

“Mine is far superior,” was what my mom had to say of the Kirby when she was alive and she was right. I hated it. Fortunately for me, my sister and dad didn’t like the Rainbow and we traded back. I was ecstatic that I was actually getting it, but back in my apartment I found that its hose was ripped and had been duct-taped and it wasn’t working well. Then Dan accidentally broke the caddy for the extra attachments. Initially I felt intense irritation that it had been so mishandled and then I felt grateful for the chance to restore it.

The entire time Brian was here this morning, I fought a strange mix of tearfulness; I felt the pride a son might in fixing up his dad’s old Cadillac. The whole thing---a Rainbow man in my living room, my offering him coffee the way my mom would have---made me feel so much like her. She would be so glad that I’m putting the money into her Rainbow. “It’s a good machine!” she would say.

I told Brian I would be a Rainbow customer for life---one of those moments when I hear myself sounding exactly like her---but I wasn’t ready to spend $2,000 for a new machine.

I want to keep this one alive as long as I can, I told him.

I’m not even sure how old it is, though I think it’s the second one she owned. It could be over 20 years old. Brian said some people keep them running for 40. I’m sure somewhere my mom wrote down when she bought it. If it hasn’t been thrown out, there undoubtedly exists somewhere a manila folder held closed with an elastic band, which contains all documentation on her Rainbow complete with notes from the day she bought it jotted down in her warm scrawl. ”Brian---nice guy!” she would have written of today’s visit.

Walking in on me writing down my own notes after the appointment, Dan smiled. “Gig!” he said.

I kept writing.

9/25/11...Option to trade-in, refurbished models available...

But there was one piece of information provided that I didn’t need to write down: Brian’s warning about leaving the water basin attached when the machine isn’t running.

When he said it, I arched my eyebrows at Dan. He has been warned about this several times.

Lifetime Movies present - A Writer's Dilemma: The Lola Mellowsky Story

I take every opportunity to post this photo. The power of visualization.

So, there I was---“writing.” When I put it in quotation marks it means I have the document on which I am supposed to be working open on my desktop but am instead engaging in “research”. ( For example, today it was integral to my “writing” that I watch the Jim Carrey/Emma Stone video ). (The Spanish subtitles made it somehow better for me.)

Then I got to thinking of the really important stuff.

I got to planning which, as any successful human knows, is something regular people think successful people do a lot of. (This is what I’ve heard. Being neither successful nor particularly regular, I can’t speak with any certainty.) So I’m sitting there and I’m doing my planning thing---if I write for a few hours before tomorrow’s dentist appointment and then return e-mails afterwards from the coffee shop then I’ll have plenty of time in the evening to check and see if Emma Stone made a response video (she really should). It was then that I realized that I have left the most important detail of my writing career---perhaps the most important detail of my life; perhaps the most important detail of all the details in the land--- completely unexamined.

What picture am I going to use for the book jacket of my as yet unwritten book?

HOW COULD I HAVE OVERLOOKED THIS?

This is way more important than unquotationed-marked writing.

Shall I hold a cup of coffee? French-pressed or cappuccino? Should I be snuggling with a dog? Do I need to get the dog now so it will like me enough by the time I publish to sit through the photo shoot? A well-bred black lab or an orphaned three-legged mutt with cataracts? Will a downtrodden dog upstage me?

Should I smile warmly from a riverfront porch or try for depth and intelligence against a backdrop of bookshelves and a Manhattan skyline? Do I put my chin in my palm? Should I be on a swing set laughing joyously in long braids? Should I start growing my hair out now?

Do I need to start working on my Blue Steel? Should I sleep with the photographer so he goes heavy on the air-brushing? Should I use a picture of Emma Stone instead?

Should I wear a vest?

Do you think vests will be in by the time I publish?

Are vests in now?

Should the caption under the photo say “The writer at her home in NH” or “The writer on a water slide” or the “The writer making a ham sandwich”?

And what of the “About The Author”?

This is Lola Mellowsky's first published work though she always wished she had come up with the idea for the Encyclopedia Brown books. She looks forward to embarking on her own young adult series, Thesaurus Blue.

And the acknowledgements?

I wouldn’t be here were it not for the generous spirit of a kind-hearted many who let me blow them to get published. And this book certainly wouldn’t have come together without the CVS clerk who let me blow him for the Scotch Tape.

Of course a shout out to my 11th grade PE teacher is in order for flunking me and thereby cementing my understanding that I would never play professional badminton but I was hoping to save that for my Oscar speech.

Now that I've identified this oversight I'll be sure to give it far too much undivided attention.

But not now. Now I must go and "write."

Thesaurus Blue isn't going to write itself.

Besides, I'm pretty sure I've found the perfect photo.



The writer after Nog-Bombs on Christmas morning.