East Mombasha kids

We were the kids of lovers. Of artists and painters and carpenters. Of adults with dreams we never knew, of lives we only saw parts of. Our parents were hippies and hunters and most of them smoked like chimneys. They went to work everyday and ate dinner with us each night. They chopped logs for our wood stoves and made us rake leaves til blisters decorated our tiny hands.

We fought with our siblings. We tattled to our parents and who ever else might listen. We fell asleep in the summer exhausted and covered in mosquito bites, greasy from Skin So Soft with hair smelling of citronella candles and firewood. There was no air conditioning, just a fan if we were lucky enough to get it.


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I mostly only use this space to write about my grandmother and my struggle with her slide into Alzheimer's. Yesterday I had the pleasure of having one of my childhood friends over to my mom's house for dinner. The Schernes and the Papagnis lived on the same dirt road for almost twenty years and we share a treasure trove of memories and stories of a childhood spent running through the same woods. Us children have all grown up and we now have families of our own. My mother is the only parent of the two families left and that breaks my heart.

I was driving away from my mom's house today alone when my phone rang. I glanced down and saw it was my mom calling and pulled over so I could answer it. She told me Maggie wanted me to come back. She really wanted to visit my grandma. So we hung up and I turned around and drove back and got my sweet middle child and drove with her to the nursing home, mostly in silence, thinking of the night before and how nice it had been.

A common theme with me lately seems to be the idea that life is going by so quickly. I see it in my children and how fast they grow. I see it in my grandma and her seemingly constant deterioration. I think about my life as a kid with a mixture of sadness and gratitude. All of it, my kids and my grandma and looking back on what was, makes me want to appreciate what I have now. I want these to be the days I look back on in twenty years and remember how wonderful they were.