This is a picture of yesterday’s beach where we stopped near the end of a long road trip before getting to the ‘rents. When we got there, we found my mom buried in the mung of her bedroom trying to spiff things up* before the rest of the guests arrive.

*Consolidate what appeared to be decades of junk mail into every zipping plastic case from which she’s ever removed a set of sheets.

That woman is a saver! There is another word for it. In keeping with the strict policy of “let’s not go there” that characterizes the family’s treatment of dysfunction, I won’t use it.

She insists this stuff is important and needs to be gone through. To implicate me in the process, she rifles through piles on her bed and finds an aged, crisp plastic grocery bag she’d been saving since the 1970s. “These are yours,” she declares.

I wait until this morning to sieve through the clippings, cards, a few pictures and some letters from forgotten boyfriends that I’d squirreled away somewhere before I left for college. I read through them this morning in the hopes of finding some gem, but mostly it is all so sophomoric it just makes me squirm.

Among the contents is one random thing in her handwriting–a list on a small scrap of paper:

water – food – heat

King Hussein = Jordan

Russia – 42K

pg 99 (in 1999)

pg 100 (in year 2000)

pg 100 closes out millennium with joy

pg 101-107 (foreboding)

tribulation? Judgment of God –

pg 101 (huddled in his home)

Micah 7:3 God man perished off the earth –

pg 102: 1

Banks – w/not let you draw out money after April

Nat’l Guard – (test) May 1st

May Day –

Martial Law*

*a box was drawn around these words

Bay Leaves – on top of flour

It is a list of what to be afraid of . . . at the end of times which were fire-breathing down on the late ’90s when she wrote it . . . it captures her parenting almost perfectly.

It is no small thing to have survived.