Pardon my departure from this blog, my mom was trying to die from pneumonia for a week and now she's been home a week flooding my back house with diarrhea and I have felt very out of body, mostly just into her body and keeping her body going and knowing that it is not forever, now. I am finally getting the picture that I am not fixing this dementia and going to get my mom back with a big ribbon on her under my christmas tree. I get my mom for right now, breathing much better, snug in her bed that I made for her, under the dangling christmas lights, next to the garage full of stuff from 26 years of kids, barely sorted through, but I have my mom. Little vulnerable thing, she has no one. She has me. I just see all those years where she ran the ship and made weird things important, like dancing, and making creamed chipped beef, and psychics who worked in the laundry at her work, and her jolly face, always her face, she was always there. Maybe she was a little obsessed with herself but who isn't obsessed with themselves. She was always there, the face I looked for to feel comfort. I still need her. But I understand now. I cain't always fight the pneumonia. Sometime she will need to slide out and go live with gramma, she will be so happy to be back at the Haley family reunion, in the sky, with the runny potato salad and most of the relatives that you don't like. But gramma was so good. Squatty, and sensible, and living near water always. I always wished I'd had the 15 siblings she'd had. What a crowded, rambunctious house that musta been, in Easton, Maryland. It's a tiny brick house, just up from the marina. We saw it. Anyway. Because of gramma marrying boring and mean Grandpa Hollaway, and having my bonny faced mom, I am.
I'm just glad for the comfort of her face. Safe at home. We've had such a long life together. I'm so lucky to have her still here, to feel with my nose. Moms and grammas and daughters are somethin.
The best thing about the hospital was the soup. And the guy named Logan who took us in the ambulance. ER is way better on tv than in person, make a note.
While in the hospital, my mom aced her swallow test, she isn't aspirating. I told them she isn't aspirating. She just needed an antibiotic. The home health totally fucked me up by not giving me an antibiotic on Friday night. By Sunday night she had pneumonia and thus the very first mother daughter Logan ambulance ride. Logan was skinny jeans thin. A fireman. He would burn instantly, like flash paper, he'd be disintegrated in a cough, by fire. He couldn't have weighed more than a pocket protector. I'm so grateful there are crowds of people working at hospitals and in ambulances that are there for you when your mom can't breathe. I'm also really glad I'm not one of those people.
I'm a teach people to ride person. Which is what I was going to blog about. My day today.
I don't actually like to do this teaching that much, but always I need the hay money and I'm kind of curious and at the same time terrified at meeting new people. I stress out so much when new people are coming to learn to ride. Then I do the lesson, 150% as I always do everything (except cooking) and then it takes me all day to readjust. People in my face take it all out of me, like my energy whirls right out of me and they take it away in carry out containers. I have no idea how not to do this. I just flow right out and puddle everywhere.
So today this girl named Kjersti and husband named Mauricio came to learn to ride. Kjersti was from Norway and from the size of her pants she had not been skimping on the chocolate up there. She met Mauricio on Tinder during the pandemic and they talked on the phone for two years before finally meeting. He's an electrician. When they were texted me to come for the lesson, she said they wanted to learn horses because they were about to move to Chile and wanted to get their own horses so they wanted to know how to do it. I figured they were retirees, like in their 60s, so when they showed up Mauricio looks like he just finished high school and he married his Norwegian nanny, Fat Sal. Big boned really. She looks like she drained an entire dairy farm before emigrating. Milk fed. Those kids they have are going to be latin dancing snow globes.
So aside from being surprised by their youth and the size of her, which I was instantly feeling sorry for old Dewey, who has arthritis and took one look at her like oh hell no but he gave me the side eye and lowered his head because okkkkkay I like to eat hay, I'll hellllp with the hay bill, he says.
Apparently Mauricio is retiring at the age of preschool, he inherited a 30 acre farm in Chile from his grandfather, it has a house on it with electricity and a well, it's 30 minutes from the beach and ten minutes from a river and the town. I was already packing my bags and asking him how many shorts I should bring, they leave November 7th.
I gave them the basics of riding, how to catch your horse, I put a brush in Kjersti's hand and she sort of held it limply but eventually did the job, Mauricio was more hardy, picking out Maggie's feet, learning how to saddle up. They live nearby in Burbank. She used to be a nurse but she said you know, after 9 years I needed a change. So she came here and is a dog walker. Then one of her dog walker owners is 80 and fell down and so now she's been patching her up as her nurse. I love wound care she said, a phrase that I'm pretty sure she used on Tinder.
I got them all mounted up, Dewey almost broke in half when she hefted up there, and again, she's not fat, she's just her bones must be solid metal pipes in there. I guess the winters are pretty rugged in Norway, they gotta have like twice the bone density.
She asked where the best place to canter was, and I was like not here with me, that's for sure. You are just riding for the first time since you were a kid. That's like asking where you sign up for the Indy 500 while you're learning driver's ed.
Also it was about a billion degrees, did I mention, the amount of water draining down my face was refreshing if it hadn't been hot soup temperature. I tried to look normal as I walked the dogs alongside them up the path, noting that my water bottle was almost at the end of the water and I also don't like walking that's why I have horses.
I got them up to the flat straight part where there is actually a space to canter and the horses are used to cantering there so I said ok actually you can canter here, and there they went. Together, like carousel horses, my sweet buddies took good care of them and cantered easily up the little dirt trail sections between driveways that gives them enough space for a good feel of cantering without it being so long that the horses would go crazy taking off or anything.
The hardest part of teaching the lesson and waiting for the money at the end is all the pretending to be interested in everything. I genuinely AM interested in people but when people are paying you for a service you have to do the service, act like you're not doing it for the money, and then write all about them later in your blog.
They had such a good time they said, because they learned so much, and they said oh we are coming back and I was like please just go to chile and send me your instagram so I can watch this unfold. If they were a bit smaller of a people, it would actually be great but I am a little sorry for my horses.
I can't imagine being 32 or 28 and retiring to a place where I knew no one and raising my kids in a country where I knew no one and there was no road that lead to Ventura Beach. I guess you find your new beach. I guess if you're from Norway you're just so glad to be anywhere else, and without a parka.
After I closed the gate on those immense people and came back in to feed my mom and see Bess for five minutes before she sweatily loaded people onto buses at the hollywood bowl and in a week we will be loading her back to UCSB, and then my mom is sleeping more and not eating that much and I hope she's okay, and I mucked the barn and put mom to bed and sat in the pool while the dogs hung out camped out right next to me saying
it's okay man. We're here.
