Mother with a Samuel Adams Cherry Harvest Ale and a slice of Pizza Hut Bistro pepperoni pizza – the first of 2008.

Summer on rope swing.

Yes, we are heading up Indiana 9 to the Howe Military School corner where a left hand turn and about 8 miles will take us to my first home. I guess I’ll take my camera and maybe my granddaughter, but we’re not sure on the latter.

No, we’re not going to have any down home heartland Methodist/Presbyterian food – the Presbyterian influence coming from my grandmother, whose mother was of Scottish descent. We are going to stop and pick up a pizza at the Pizza Hut just north of LaGrange . . . and if we take Summer, we will get her a personal pan cheese pizza ’cause she’s a pizza wimp.

Guess we’ll be putting together the wagon Mother bought at Winfred’s to tow behind on of the lawn tractors. It’s red and that’s about all I know about it. Hooking up her TV converter boxes too. The PBS station in South Bend lost its analog tower in a storm and decided to just go digital now. Don’t blame them.

Mother could get cable now, but I doubt she will; she reads a lot, dontcha know?

I have my list of stuff to take up there: a book; the fancy, but slightly broken articulated large wooden bird that if repaired correctly will flap in the wind. I got it a rummage sale – she likes that sort of challenge; Diet Pepsi because we have a sale; a bottle of beer. She still has the one she took home at Christmas and stuck in a snowbank and then moved to the refrigerator, but doesn’t know if she wants to drink that one. So the Der Bingle friend is taking her a variety carton of 12 Samuel Adams beers. He likes to do things for her, such as when 30 years ago she decided she wanted to smoke a pipe like mountain women, he bought her exotic tobaccos.

I will have to get a picture of the two of them; she will gripe about because she says she will just be working out until we come. She doesn’t mean working out as in a gym; she means working on the other side of the house door. Outside. And she wears raggedy clothing when she does so. Ask her to leave the premises, however, and it’s Jones of New York or Pendleton or Talbots . . . purchased at Goodwill, of course. She is a small size and gets stuff for 50¢. You see, up here, people who need inexpensive clothing won’t buy it and so the money she spends goes to the fund. Ironic, but true.

To tell the truth, which she often does, she never wanted a kid, but here I am. My daddy and my grandmother were the ones who hugged me. She wasn’t that way, but once driving to Indiana University, my father told me she had always done the best she could for me. Now, Daddy is gone, and here we still are – Mother and I.