FAMILY
It turns out my own impulse as a writer might have been genetic.
We spent the Fourth of July on our bikes. 38 miles total trip, including a morning ride out to the museum with our friend Heather and then a finishing leg out to my parents’ house for an afternoon bar-be-cue. Good food and good times were had by all.
Which brings me to the sixth, Monday, when I flew up to New Jersey for a short trip to visit the family. Nana’s sister Meda was in town from Missouri, as were cousins Tracy and Shannon and Shannon’s boy Jackson. It was one of the best trips I have had in memory.
Nana is doing well. Her age is becoming more and more apparent (although she’s not ancient by any stretch of the imagination–just 83). Sometimes she acts younger, sometimes she acts older. It’s baffling to tell which age she prefers feeling. I suspect dementia is settling in further and further. She’s able to function very normally, although she’s far quieter than she once was in social situations. Her hearing aids have helped a lot, but still, Nana was once the center of many conversations and now she sits on the sidelines. Sometimes she moves very slowly, and sometimes she seems rather helpless, but just a month or so ago, while on a trip to Atlantic City, she negotiated down 21 flights of stairs at a hotel when she’d left her pocketbook in the casino. (Nana is very claustrophobic and hates riding elevators alone.)