Tuesday ramble, unapologetic jumble

Disappointment at 6:19 this morning as Lauritzen's vessel Graig Rotterdam 591x100 passes 7H porch in the moonlight, arriving to load wood pellets for Tyne. 

She's on schedule to depart Saturday, which I'll miss, being in Apalachicola.

So, no good clear shots of her.

Monday afternoon on 7H porch, watching that deeply rumbling cloud move slowly over and past while I nibble four fresh, rich and crispy Ritz crackers and sip a post-nap mug of tea with, as almost never done, a splash of half and a teaspoon of sugar, 

reminds me again of our conversation when my sister told me for the first time, that she and I, well Gina put herself and Walt in one place and me alone in another, grew up in different families, were raised by completely different mothers. Why my stir of memory? Because mama taught me my first cup of tea, in a teacup with saucer, crushed tea leaves scooped into an open two-piece spoon-shaped container full of holes that then clipped together like alligator jaws and, boiling water poured over, steeped until the tea was red and ready. Then a bit of milk, or it may have been a stream of Pet evaporated milk from a can, that's what my parents used instead of cream in those early days of the forties maybe during war rationing or maybe about the time Hentz or StAndrewsDairy started delivering bottles of homogenized milk to the front porch mornings instead of pasteurized milk with the cream on top; and, having lost my antecedent, a teaspoon of sugar. Or maybe two teaspoons, I was seven, eight, nine and, as my imminent 83rd birthday will attest, it was too long ago for me to count teaspoons of sugar. 

Changing by the second, a string of low, small dark clouds stretch over the horizon, beyond Shell Island, several of whom, some clouds are whom not which, look like camels squatting down, resting as the wind slides them back and away to the west of me while also continually changing from camels to other, various and sundry beings .

Remembering that early tea lesson also stirs this. Though equally loved, children who come along later seem never to get the same amount and intensity of caring time as did we first and oldest sons and daughters. For me, Bible lessons, memory work, verses to hold that can still be called up, sword drills; with a sweet voice mama sang me her old favorite Baptist hymns while playing them on the piano; how to brush, how to floss, how to dry off after my bath; though later all three of us learned, winter evenings, to warm our sleepers on the hot space heater in the hall outside the bathroom door. But me again, that first cup of hot, clear red tea that always comes back when I add cream and sugar, which happens seldom, maybe twice a year. Or three times in half a dozen years. 

Again, as told from here before, Gina and I had, were having, that long conversation as we stood just outside the front door of Community rehab and residential home where mama was dying but constantly asking me, "Why am I here? Is this jail? Why am I in jail? Was I drunk?" I never in my 75 years with her saw mama touch an alcoholic drink, so I don't know where that came from, alcohol wasn't even allowed in our house. Anyway that day, quiet, a little warmer than perfect, would have been midsummer 2011 because mama died mid July, it was the day I met my sister for the first time, hearing that we had grown up with two different mothers, in two different families. I never knew. I'd never known. I never'd have known but for our pause and long visit that hour before each of us headed back into our own lives for the day. Seven years on, I'm still astonished.

From my brother since our father died, and from my sister as from that hour, I learned more than all my colleges, schools and life. About myself and about a family that had been not at all the family I knew. Realizations. 

In my own life I remember wondering, the evening Joe was born and a day or so later when we brought him home, wondering how I could ever possibly squeeze out of me a bit more of the love that I'd so doted on Malinda, our firstborn who answered my prayers for a girl, since the moment the nurses showed her to me that June 25th predawn in 1958 - - how could I possibly love a second child so much? And then, coming along nearly fourteen years later, Tass, another only child as the first two grew up and out of our lives into lives of their own. Moments with each of the three, of ineffably intense love and agony: did you ever leave your youngest daughter at college and drive away into the anguish? 

And twenty years later, what taught me that I could make it through leaving Kristen at Emory? that I'd lived through leaving Tass at college in Virginia, and that I had somehow managed to live through Nicholas moving from Florida to Michigan. That my father wrote me a week later, September 1953, that mama cried all the way home to Panama City after leaving me at UF in Gainesville that Sunday as I turned 18, so jubilant, never knowing the grief I'd left behind. Tass so excited. Kristen quiet, not quite teary. Joe driving off forever to his girlfriend in Nevada and then the Army. Experience teaches what we can do, that we can do it. In her junior year of high school, Caroline will in another year be raising her parents' separation anxiety, and, frankly, mine from a hundred miles away.

Now about to cross 83, what threatens as I distinctly remember dreading leaving my twenties and becoming thirty, a step toward middle age. Would I go back to thirty? No way in hell. 

Family in heart and mind: I didn't get to see my brother the last time we were in Pensacola and I'm going to try and make sure that never happens again. Having supper with Walt and Judy early this summer, I don't think he will mind my telling this: I was emotionally overwhelmed when my brother told me that when I left to go to college he went into an upstairs closet where he had a chair, sat and cried. 

For weather this morning, an anvil. But it seems to be growing smaller as I watch; a case when bigger is not necessarily better.

+++++++++++++ 

From earlier memories, boyhood excitement, learning and loving American planes during World War Two, seeing pictures and learning about British warplanes, memorizing hated German planes just in case, thinking all Jap planes were Zeroes; so Monday reading about an American P-38 Lockheed Lightning found frozen in Time deep in a Greenland glacier, that wonder of wonders twin fuselage plane, it could be but I don't think it's my imagination the thrill of seeing a P-38 flying over us from Tyndall Field during the war. 

Maybe Robert knows for sure.

T