Yesterday, after mowing and before going to visit my mom, I went to Oakley Corners. (The visit with mom was, sadly, pretty awful. I learned that she's becoming violent - she tried to brain one of my nieces with a can of beans, which would be funny if it wasn't terrible - and she's now in diapers. Dear Flying Spaghetti Monster: She's eighty-eight years old. Her mind is gone. She's trying to kill people. She's hallucinating. She's incontinent. Can't you just, like, END THIS already? I know that sounds awful, but man oh man, this sucks.)
But! Oakley Corners was lovely, as usual.
The beavers are hard at work:
People have been busy making rock piles:
Look at the top of that one!:
This was at one of the trail crossings - is it supposed to be a sign? Or maybe somebody was setting up a pine-cone campfire for the next passers-by. Do pine cones even burn? I do not know.
I don't find the deer bones - the deer bones find me:
Does anybody know the name of this flower?
I never realized how many different shades of purple there were until I started looking at wildflowers:
And the trillium is blooming!
How was everybody's Mother's Day?
8 comments:
The flower is Fringed Polygala, according to a site about New York Wildflowers by David Ruppert....easy to find. Your pictures are excellent as usual, especially for folks who can't go hiking.
It isn't awful to wish that the trauma with your mother is over....Hope the thinking is changing from the old days, anyway.
Ginny
P.S. Wondering if you would get anything out of the support websites for families of people with Alzheimers.....The things other people post can range from downright uplifting and strengthening to extreme eyerolling, as in, "what a maroon" (Bugs Bunny, circa 1949). But sometimes the good comments/ideas are worth it.....as in, wow, why didn't we think of that?...or in being able to see something from a different, less painful perspective.............Ginny
I know what that feels like. God bless and rest my father-in-law who died of a mysterious illness in the early 1980s after a blood transfusion (hm, what COULD it have been?). His death was horrible for him and slow and took the heart out of everyone who loved him. Toward the end I kept thinking, he needs to go. He needs to go, he can't take more than this. To the point where, yes, it was something of a relief when he died.
Fringed Polygala! Try saying THAT three times fast! Thanks, Ginny.
and yeah, my family gets all kinds of support, both on-line and locally. There's all kinds of resources out there ... none of which change the basic sucky facts of the situation. Complicating things is my brother-in-law, who absolutely REFUSES to consider putting mom in a nursing home. It's, like, "Okay, so just make things ten times worse for all of us, including your WIFE, who is mom's main caregiver". Christ.
and Becs, I'm pretty sure I'm not gotta shed any tears when mom goes. Harsh, but true.
Criminy! I thought she was IN a nursing home, the way you talked about it! I thought it was paid nursing staff putting up with the violent episodes and the diapers!.....Ginny
Oh lord, Ginny, the whole thing is a tawdry mess - the REASON my BIL is so adamant against a nursing home is because he and his wife (my sister Tib) have been draining my mom's bank accounts dry while she lives with them.
As soon as the money runs out, which should be in about two years at the rate they're going, BAM! Nursing Home City. It's so awful.
Should we guess that your sister and BIL don't read this blog???
Nobody in my family except for my sister Texas knows that this blog exists. Although, frankly, I wouldn't care if they did read it.
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