Hang Ten

Max found our wedding album the other day and has delighted in looking through it over and over again. It makes me happy I went through a crazy nesting and scrap-booking phase while I was pregnant. I culled through the millions of boxes of wedding pictures I had and painstakingly pasted my favorites into a scrapbook replete with my lame attempts at making them cute and clever with paper.

I also, during that hormone crazed trimester, insisted I needed to make new curtains for our bedroom. I lugged out this old sewing machine my aunt was going to toss before I saved it, called a friend to show me how to load the bobbin and I was off. Off my rocker. I made the most hideous curtains I have ever seen, but I stayed up all night to do it and frankly, if you consider I had not sewn anything since high school home economics class, they weren’t half bad.

At least that is what Mike said when I woke him up at 2am to hang my freshly made curtains. He really is a very good husband when I think about it. That is, when I quit nagging him long enough to think about it.

Max and I were looking at the wedding photos for the 50^th time and for the 50^th time I was having to answer the question, “Who’s that?” while he pointed to the pictures of my mom.

My answer is always the same, “That’s Mere, my Mommy, but she is heaven with Sam.”

And he says, “Yeah, Sam was old and she died and went to heaven with Mere and the other dogs.”

It makes me wonder what on earth is going through his mind. Does he imagine my mother surrounded by hundreds of dogs, laughing and frolicking with them? That would be kind of cool to me, but I think Mom would be slightly miffed by all those dogs all over here and would not consider it her version of heaven.

But maybe it is Max’s version of heaven, being chased and licked by hundreds of tail-wagging dogs.

This Saturday is the 4 year anniversary of the hurricane. My mother did not die during the storm, but I equate her death with the storm because everything seemed to happen at once in one ugly blur – the evacuation, the storm, the levees breaking, not being able to go home, the birth of Max in Houston and my mother’s ultimate death 6 months later.

It was nice to look at the wedding pictures with Max and remember that life was once calm and predictable, then there were the chaotic years of the storm, and now, the tide is going out again. It is the ebb and flow of life, and I’m just surfing the waves, hanging on, and hoping the board doesn’t rear up and smack me in the back of the head.