I think I roasted the squash just for spite. Or a distraction—something else to gripe about, something to take her mind off the many things I hadn’t done right in the short time I was there. Too much tomato in the recipe. Not enough water in the soup. The recycling “system” botched. The coffee not made. The shower not squeegeed. Too much this. Not enough that. Goldilocks syndrome, minus the “just right.” And the consummate sin, an indulgence in contraband dairy: “you gonna eat all that BUTTER on that??” Spat like butter is a dirty word. When I leave, she’ll pitch the little tub of Land O’ Lakes like I’d been housing poison in the fridge. The porridge is too cold, the bed too hard, and the chair is busted.

Meanwhile, in and around and in spite of her, making meals for the freezer (No plastic!!). Heating up sustenance for her little bird frame (No microwave!). Trying to procure the right ice packs or other necessaries for her out in the Boondoggle (NO Amazon!). Listening hard for the wishes and desires buried deep in their shell of criticism and disapproval. Little like trying to love on a minefield. Wanna lay down, spread my body over it before it all blows up. Painfully aware that what I wanted to bring (care, can-do, problems solved, solutions in place, pounds of prevention), I didn’t. And what I didn’t want to bring, I did. Dis-couraged, to say the least. Resigning myself to hearing about it all over and over, again and again. The too much sauce in the tofu scramble really will outlast my departure, you wait.

It’s funny they use a food metaphor for this station: the sandwich generation. Especially since the all vegan, no oil, zero fat diet is still going strong (kind of a misnomer, that) and this one will have none of the caretaking you think you’ve come to give. None of it! She sure as %$#@! ain’t eating any sandwiches. Oh sure, pour the wine and play the cards and drive us to the symphony. Cue the movie, glue the busted stuff, piece the puzzle, cook the soup, carry the heavy and fix the infernal tech. But make calls to in-home health care or medical facilities? Line up check-ins or PT appointments? Get a straight answer about that Cardio check-up last week? Age-proof or simplify anything? Well, I take it back. The ol’ bird has quite a hearty swing on her yet. This is the girl, who upon moving into an assisted living facility last fall after 47 years in her old country home and upon hearing about the lovely, sane safety protocols such a facility would naturally have in place (“pull any cord from any room and that sends the rescue squad right to your place”), promptly decided the cords got in the way of her décor and cut them off.

So much for noses and faces. It’s like that every visit, more so since her fall. Mom fell last month, on my watch. We were crossing a dark parking lot after a lovely restaurant meal (and yet another re-trained chef who “just doesn’t need to cook with all that oil anyway”), after shall we say a FULL menu of political diatribe (sure, dessert!), after a glass or two of wine, and you know? I saw that rise in the pavement. I briefly registered how dark it was once we got outside, but I kept going, grateful for a breath alone. Unattended and trying to catch up, down she went, the leaves and debris swirling all around, like arms almost, reaching up to soften the fall, or turn it to a roll. What else could it be? She came up laughing and sputtering and climbed her self into my car, covered in leaves. The debris is still all over my car floor. She was covered. A tiny swamp creature in a pink cashmere sweater. Holding up and turning her arms and wrists in front of her, first this one that one, then both as if they were newly attached, marveling. Nothing broken! NOTHING broken! When you are this age, and the bodyweight of a badger (OK, a wet badger), well the “F” word is a bad one. “F” is for fear. “F” is for frail (NO fat is good fat, Idon’tcarehwhattheysay!) “F” is for fall—the dance of this season, apparently. Nothing broken but my sanity and peace.

Since then she has been doing steadily better, walker to cane, cane to counter or table’s edge, pulling herself along—not unlike a toddler with those first steps from purchase to purchase, willing her body to work. Bookmark that “T” word, ’cause it’s coming back around. I tell you what. The cycles. I’m on the weary one. Fall weekend, remember? Each year this time—trucking north, going home. It began with my dad’s diagnosis, over a decade ago. Made sense. Dad’s sick, go home. The next year: dad’s really sick, go home again. And the next: dad’s gone, go home. After that it evolved into harvest festivals, country fairs, farmer markets, theater tickets, birthday trips. But really. Look at this weather. Look at the times. Look at the gasp they call life and how quickly it all goes. Does anyone really need a reason? Mom, I tell her. You don’t need to get tickets to something for me to come home. These are the days, these middle age days, anyway, when you want one. A home to go home to. Truth be told, what I really want is my mom.

And somehow it’s always about the un-gardening. Turning perfectly beautiful and very alive potted plants into the ground. Zinnias and petunias, so happy and full in the warm fall sun, basking in their “wasn’t it a fun summer!” glow. And she the consummate gardener. Knowing. Annuals, all. They will be smote in a single night. So she takes them first, probably the most merciful way—heave them over the stone wall deep in the woods—gone back to the earth. For me, so unable to let go, this is a hard step. Who kills a perfectly good living plant? So unable. Sillyjenny. I want to run a rescue mission to the south, where stuff survives. Set up a plant rescue for the impatiens and begonias she so breezily murders. Last month I made off with the rosemary and basil, along with some cheery New Guinea impatiens that are already looking tired and ready for the compost bed in Virginia, but at least I gave them a few more weeks of life. I have a hard time, can you tell? Letting. Go.

I have a secret dream, and in it mom is in a wheel chair—ok, yes, a transport chair as it is now called. Apparently the whole culture has a hang up about invalidity. And why wouldn’t we? No person of compromised mobility wants to be deemed in-valid. Wool hail no. Mom insisting she can take me to the airport because her “driving leg” is still good. What in the ^%$#! In my dream she’s tucked comfortably into anything with wheels that I can push (I don’t care if it’s a wheelbarrow or a jogging stroller, since for all that she’d probably fit) and we are strolling at a clip along the Rail Trail, taking in the beautiful scenery in the bright autumn sun. She, talking a mile a minute and me matching that pace with my feet for mile after mile after mile. Having watched her mobility slow over the past few and now with this injury come to a halt, I know the fire inside. I can feel it. This is our travellin’ girl, remember? Forty-six of the contiguous US states and at least a third as many countries in her lifetime, my globe-trottin’ mom. Now stuck in limbo between the bed and the bathroom. It’s humbling for all involved.

So the more I push the faster we go, the more we can see, and the trail lays out before us like an invitation, lined on both sides by farm fields with their long red tobacco barns, weathered and faded like faraway box cars, and beyond that the thinning woods, wild and standing tall. Our gauntlet. And we are running it, me with my step count rising by the thousands and she with more unrestricted movement than she’s had for years. Of course, the epic movie soundtrack is playing (See Spotify Girl May 2021) and of course the camera pans wide to take in patchwork acres of field upon field as far as the eye can see. Look down, see the two little dots and the thing with wheels? Two old girls out for the ride/run of their lives. And we are free. Free from every spat, argument, and power struggle. Free from the reality closing in like a cataract, like the unstoppable end of the year. We are free from the toddler tug of war over who will give the care and who will take it. The maternal standoff falls away as we walk, now run, now fly (can’t you just see the documentary or Hallmark moment here, soundtrack swelling?)—I am free to give, give exactly what I came with, which in some remarkable spark of miracle here among the Connecticut corn fields is exactly what she wants.

But NO! SCrreeetch. We’re not doing that, we’re just not doing that. “I’m not getting in some (insert mild profanity) wheel chair” (the word carrying with it the same disgust as “butter”). A professional would tell me it’s just fear and control speaking its love language of later-life: “NO!” and “Let ME do it.” But the mother in me, weary after nearly 30 years the same, thought perhaps there would be a respite, or a place of having arrived, from the toddler’s will in my life. I’ve wrenched kids into car seats and peeled them out of snowsuits, wrangled naps out of them and vegetables into them, seen to teeth brushing (so, SO sorry, Ellie) and bathing and toileting and training on every little thing to now have (almost) turned them out into a world gone completely stark raving mad. But I did not see clearly how it happens at the other end. How what you think is a good idea becomes an affront to every cell of their independence. Not a solution, but a threat. Not a gift, but a theft. Not a service but a severance of will and autonomy which, as if making up for all the unavoidable attritions—physical, mental, and otherwise—has risen up larger than life.

So I am weary. I want to leave but I don’t. I want to go home but part of me is home already and it won’t leave. I want, as my sister said when she was here on caregiver duty, to throw her in my carry-on (she’d fit) and spirit her home, to my home, where I can care more fully in the land of microwaves and dishwashers, where we might run the water continuously to wash a pan or turn a laundry cycle to “warm” water. Lord a mercy, YES! Where we cook with oil and (occasionally) leave lights on when we’re not in the room. We are, after all, mothers, and once you set that cycle to “Care” and to “Heavy Load,” well, the machine locks and there’s no stoppin’ it. Ask the ones who toddlered and teened under my roof.

So my last walk that morning was a bit of angry, exasperated defiance just before leaving, and my discovery of a random undestroyed vegetable in a neighboring field became the weird trophy I bore back to her kitchen. It’s a pretty rural development, her new place, so it runs right up against farmlands. It’s why my dream whispers when I’m there. This one has clearly been tilled, and recently. The exposed earth is baked dry and littered with chunked up pumpkins, gourds and squash, the remains of a crop well beyond harvest—the rejects, really, now being turned under. Littered. The pieces no bigger than a cup. Many-colored though, and pretty, darkest greens and rich oranges. Potsherds for as far as the eye could see, sprayed across the broad field right up the the edge of the November woods.

Here is my minefield, in tangible living color. The symbolism smacks me harder that the chill air. But I stand a moment marveling at this plainly New England tableau. And everything about this moment is in synch. The last hour of my week-long visit to bury my uncle and be around for mom, the last season of the year in the near last month and all around, the leaves releasing, the day surrendering, the warmth dying, the light redacting into its purest, warmest smile over the way it’s always been. You can fight it, or you can accept it. The year is dying all the same. As goodbyes go, this one is rich and furiously full for me.

So how ’bout it? A little “home grown” for she who eats only organic. I tee hee hee my way back to the house, thinking of my prize and how it will distract from all the arguments laying by the front door waiting to be had just in getting to the airport. Standing here now, I scatter them to the wind and steel myself for the good-bye. I will leave this place, this person, in peace if it is the last thing I do. This little banged up gourd my peace offering.

So just before departure, I washed that squash in the kitchen sink. Darkest green and wide ribbed, pretty sizeable, for all that. It could have come from the Big Y. But it didn’t. It came from the field right next to her cottage. Farm to table so to speak, if I can actually get it there. Why not? I waited for the bitching to begin. I halved it, ignoring the chunks and dings to the outside, finding the inside bright orange and fresh, filled in its little cavity with seeds. I quartered it and set the pieces in a roasting pan, and still the objections did not come. And I roasted that squash while I packed and showered and readied for the leave-taking, which is a little harder each time. So much behind us this trip. A fall, a death, an election (another death), a slow healing and a vacuum where professional care should be—and a long winter ahead in her “You can’t make me be assisted” assisted living facility.

Slowly the kitchen came to smell like the warmth and industry of a thanksgiving feast from years past. What is that delicious smell? And I served up that steaming squash with nothing but fresh ground salt and pepper and a pinch of nutmeg, and the two of us sat at her kitchen table marveling over it. Wasn’t it delicious! Wasn’t it the best! Warm and sweet. I didn’t even reach for the execrable spread. The season’s last offering, a decidedly weird lunch, and an attention magnet for all the stuff that we needed to let go. Banged up, badly dented, half buried when I spied it, almost passed over and counted as gone. Bearing its not-yet-brokenness to the sun. The silly incongruous act, what did it do? It simplified the moment, purified the duration of my visit and the season surrounding us. Mama, look on the inside. What I have brought you…is love.

And it will feed us. Yes it will.

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