Home Again

After four days in Durham, it was so good to be home again.  I understand that in my absence, Lacy took to sleeping in the living room. 

My daughter is fine now. I guess all she needed was some company and some home cooking -those have their comfort, don't they?  She has decided I will move to the city to live with or near her - but I don't think so.  A place like Durham is not for me.  Too much gang activity - so much that the gangs have spilled into other counties to commit their crimes.  And every time I read an unnerving article about Durham, I check the streets named to see how close to Beth the incident occurred.  The logical thing is for her to do is move back here.  The pace is slower, salaries are lower - but so is the cost of living and the crime rate.

Dad's doctor wrote an order for morphine a week or two ago.  Dad took the doses for a few days and then stopped.  He says it burned his mouth too much, but I think I know what the problem really was...he slept too much.

He is so thin, now. He looks like a good breeze would blow him over.  His hands are skeletal, look like they're webbed together with bruised skin.  But there is something courageous in his bearing and his refusal, if only for now, to sleep through the pain.  The other day, I caught him on the lawn mower.  "WHAT are you doing?" I asked him.  And he replied in a garbled voice and with a bit of a laugh - "What the __ does it look like I'm doing?"  Occasionally, he drives out to the store to visit the business he built, and to see some of the old customers who have been regulars for years.  Many of them come by the house to see him, and he is the least surprised to find he has a multi-racial, large "family".  Or should that read ..family.

He keeps going, determined not to miss a thing for as long as he doesn't have to, and to me, that is inspiring.