The birthday drive-by (while driving Miss Daisy)
Time to put my plan into action! I've been thinking of doing a drive-by of sorts for some time for grandma's birthday. She's all by herself, she hasn't seen family in ages, she doesn't leave her place; she deserves to have some sort of in-person contact, even if we can't hug her. I mean, even if we drove to the school parking lot and waved to her from the car, while she stood out on her balcony, we can at least do that, right? So on Sunday when we talked with her and I'd asked if there was anything we could bring her, and she suggested going to Rich's and "getting what I like," boom. Done. (…But what do you like? Turns out mom knew; she used to run to Rich's after work and bring grandma food back a few years ago, after the car accident and appendix rupture. Ah. Well, at least one of us knows!) And we couldn't go there and not bring anything home for dad, either. Okay, dad, time to find me the cooler…and the big freezy packs… (Which he did not find and put in the freezer for me, as they must be in a different cooler. But we had some smaller ones already in there and that worked out okay.)
Our goal was to leave by 10, which we did, maybe even a few minutes early. Mom did call grandma to get a list from her of her specifics, and I did the same with dad. Mom's barely been in the car in weeks, and if she has, it's been with my dad. This was like a real treat for her. She also kept rolling down her window, so I was joking it was so she could stick her head out and pant. She was like, I'm letting the germs out! …Okay, mom. Meanwhile, it was warm enough that it was 85F by 10:30 AM, so I had the air going in the car. Can we not let the hot air in, please?
She also requested we take the scenic route, i.e., Fabyan/Washington/Geneva/St. Charles (same road, four names). She got to see some of the construction at Fabyan and Kirk, and once we hit West Chicago, naturally we got stopped by a train. As soon as that passed--and the gates came down as we approached the tracks, so we had to sit through the whole thing--we got to see that the next intersection, maybe Main Street, was all torn up. We'd hit intermittent construction the entire way down that road. It was like a slalom course at times. From there, I went 83 to North, and that was okay, but after passing my other grandma's house in Franklin Park, mom wanted to do a drive-by of her (old?) job. She works off River Road, and I'm glad she didn't have to go to work last week, as it was flooded out; she may not have been able to access it, or at least not without some sort of detour. Her job used to be about a mile north of there, but they moved about 15 years ago, and I'm not sure I've ever seen the new building and had to be like, okay, pay attention; you have to tell me where to go. (She had the sound on on her phone and her girlfriend group text was pinging as one friend had cataract surgery today.) She doesn't come up the way I did and missed the entrance, despite there being a big sign for her office park. We went around a different way, and it was fine; she said the parking lot was about half full. (Shortly after that, she got a message from dad that a FedEx envelope arrived from work--it wasn't her official layoff/termination letter, but they won't be paying her insurance any longer. She is able to apply for COBRA if she'd like. She does need to return the paperwork soon, and she was like, we were *right* there! Oops. Oh well.)
Here's the thing--River Road is under major construction. It's down to one lane, and in one place north and south traffic share the southbound lanes. It was kind of confusing. Mom's telling me, uh, you'll want to be in the left lane to turn at the light, and I'm like, uh, do you not remember how we were going northbound in the southbound lane just up ahead? I'm in the right lane for a reason! She *so* does not pay attention to things, and then was antagonistic about how I was reacting to her. (This isn't anxiety. I'm not anxious about this. I'm more frustrated at your ignorance and stupidity, thanks.) And the way the lanes were coned off, it didn't look like I could make a left onto Belmont, which would get me to the store, so now I'm having to go down to the next light at Grand so I can get across the river. That was fun. Bonus, though, was seeing Gene and Jude's, a well-known area hot dog stand that was in the news last week because it was basically an island. It was all dried out by now, and the river appeared to be at a normal level. Good. So across the river, and now over to Thatcher, and…oh goody, another train. This was a Metra making a stop, and the front car had stopped across the intersection, and someone, possibly the engineer, was sitting there looking out the window at traffic while mom called grandma to let her know we were almost at the store. The Metra guy was wearing a mask and gloves, for the record. Mom was all mad, like, I thought they weren't running the trains right now! Uh, people still need to get downtown and stuff. We could sort of see into the train cars and I counted three whole people on that train, plus one more Metra employee.
Disturbing sight of the day: North of the tracks on Thatcher, there are cemeteries on both sides of the road. My great- and great-great-grandparents are buried at St. Joseph's on the west side of the street. There was a sign on the east side: Now Hiring! …Oh, dear. That's a business you *don't* want booming right about now.
It was probably about 11:15 when we got to the store, and we made a pit stop since we didn't think we could make it the whole trip without a visit to the facilities, and we didn't want to go at grandma's since we didn't want to go into her place. Lucky for us, the bathrooms were open, though this is the fun of going potty in the C-19 era: Rich's has a hand dryer, no paper towels. How do I get out of here without touching the door handle? I realized: Use my shirt. And of course that's when mom is fiddling with her purse while I'm standing there holding the door open with my foot. Like, can you do that *outside* the bathroom? And she starts calling me names because of that. God, mom. I'm not asking you to strip naked and start kissing everyone. I asked you to step out of the bathroom. Now, we'd come in one entrance, where there were a bunch of carts; the bathroom was by the other, where we only saw hand baskets, so we each took one. She bought for grandma; I bought for dad, picking out some of the deli salads (tuna, chicken, egg, cucumber, carrot/pineapple, since it sounded intriguing), pierogi (meat, sauerkraut/mushroom, sweet cheese), a poppyseed roll, and some rye bread. I realized, between all the leftovers we currently have plus what I was buying, that we probably didn't need to go regular grocery shopping this week, so I picked myself up some yogurt to have and figured our house would be set. Mom picked up a pork chop dinner from the deli, some chicken noodle soup, some deli salads, and a loaf of Jewish rye, then met back up with me so we could find the other items. Grandma wanted a quart of milk and mom had no idea what a container of that would look like--she was looking at the half-gallons. Mom, that's too big. I didn't say it, but what she wanted was a Milk Chug sort of bottle. My aunt gave grandma a recipe for chicken thighs that was pretty easy and she's been making a lot, so we found her a package of those. She requested two bananas, not ripe, and someone happened to leave two bananas in the pile, just for us (they clearly came from a bunch but we weren't going to quibble). Lastly, two cans of frozen orange juice. It was around when we looked for the milk that mom asked if I could carry both baskets, which was fine as I figured it would balance me out. But they were kind of heavy and awkward and hard to maneuver if someone was coming at me. We each got into different lines, and I didn't realize mom moved to the one next to mine until I heard her voice. Rich's had decals on the ground that said "STAND HERE" for social distancing, which was good, and plexiglass for the checkers, which was good…but here's where you can tell it's a Polish grocery store: There were three checkout lines open right next to each other, and at one point the checker in mom's line backed up into me so our butts touched. Um…I guess it counts for social distancing if you're not facing each other? Yeah, you might want to do every other lane for safety. Plus, one girl was going around and adding bags to the checker stands and she was right there too, brushing past me like it was nothing. Yeah, okay. I had my mask on, and it's not like I'm catching anything, but God forbid I bring something over to grandma, you know?
Fun fact: They have children's books in Polish in a spinner near the door at Rich's. Gotta remember that for next time.
We got out to the car, and mom immediately set about wiping down grandma's groceries and putting them into other bags I'd brought. They'd been in our possession for more than three days, so we figured they were virus-free. While she started on that, I fixed our groceries to put all but the breads in the cooler. (I should mention that I paid for grandma's and mom paid for dad's. I had the "grandma fund" from several years ago, when we'd buy things for her and she'd insist on paying us. Well, this is perfect--I can pay for her groceries out of that. The fund had about $56 in it and the food was $41 and change, so there's still some left over if we need it. We only use it to buy stuff for her, and mainly necessities, not frivolous stuff.) Mom stayed in the back seat and called grandma to let her know we'd be there in about 10 minutes. Oh, fun, Forest Preserve Drive is under construction, yay. Now, you may recall that a very busy virus testing site is at the old emissions testing station on Forest Preserve, right by the mall. Yes, well, it turns out that FPD is blocked off east of Harlem due to that. Eastbound traffic was getting detoured north. Hmm… Since FPD is already north of grandma, I opted to go south to Irving…except of course there were a bunch of people going that same way, too, so it took a couple lights for me to turn from Harlem to Irving, and then Irving was under construction for a little bit, I believe. Sigh. All I know is that I was *not* taking Irving on the way home. I do know that mom reminded grandma to bring her shopping cart and the purple jacket downstairs with her, and grandma was appreciative of the reminder, and said she'd go grab the jacket while she was still on the phone.
Grandma was waiting in the lobby when we got there. She was funny; as soon as she noticed us, she got up from her seat, opened the door, and stuck her cart in the doorway. Uh…can we come in? We had multiple bags with us--not just the groceries, which were in four or five bags themselves, but also a Target bag from me that held my gifts (two masks, an article about masks from the newspaper, a card, and a dream catcher I found in my Papa stash that matched the card I gave her), plus a big Trader Joe's bag from mom which held whatever mom was giving her. We did go into the lobby, where the mail lady was; grandma must've mentioned she was waiting for someone, and when mom came in and wished grandma a happy birthday, the mail lady went, you didn't tell me it was your birthday! I said, well, it's tomorrow. :P So then the mail lady wished her a happy birthday, which was sweet. I mean, grandma's clearly a little old lady at this point, and she's that age where people are kind purely due to that. Also, grandma had two bags of her own to give to us, so we had to take those out of the cart first. We got everything situated, and mom was like, what's this shirt? It was draped over the cart's handle. Mom, that's your purple jacket! Duh. It's been so long, she forgot what it looked like, apparently. The two of them started talking, and I pulled out my phone--I'd wanted a picture of us. I know grandma wouldn't purposely pose, but this birthday is something else and I wanted to remember it. I hope grandma lives at least as long as her mom--she passed away at 95--but you never know. I got a few selfies of us in the lobby, all wearing masks, just to prove that we did see her. Plus, I mean, I had to know what was going on with grandma's hair. She will never let go of her vanity and not being able to have her hair done is probably the hardest part of this for her. To wit, one of the items in mom's bag was her old set of hot rollers; this way grandma, who complains of her stick-straight hair (and is very jealous of my wavy curls), could try to curl her hair herself. We were curious what she'd do; mom suspected she'd be wearing a wig. As we walked up to the door and I could see her sitting on the bench in the lobby, I went, is she wearing a turban? That's really what it looked like, but she'd taken a green scarf and wound it around her head. I could see her red hair sticking out at her crown as that wasn't covered…but at the middle of her forehead, I could see her natural white. You have to zoom in pretty far, but you can see that in at least one of my three pictures. Also, there are mirrors on the walls in the lobby, and in one of the pictures, it's like, what's on grandma's head? It looked like a flowerpot or something. It ended up being the reflection; the red surrounded by the green had that effect. Funny.
We didn't stay too long, only about five minutes, and we blew kisses to each other as grandma took her cart to the elevator. It was nice to see her, and we'll call tomorrow for her actual birthday. We went today because it's her normal day to get groceries delivered, and this way she could decide if she still wanted more stuff or if this would keep her for the next week. Also, weather-wise, scattered storms were predicted all week, and today's weather looked better. (It did work out--we hit no rain during our travails, and it did rain after we returned home. It's supposed to rain for a good portion of tomorrow, and the storms possibly will be severe.) Since I already was going down to Addison, mom suggested we drive past our old house to check it out. I didn't get a 100% look at it since I was driving, but there's a pretty rose bush next to the front door, and the neighboring property has two big evergreens along the driveway. It's the corner house and our driveways are adjacent (unusual for that block), so it's almost like the trees are on our old property. They're practically crowding the neighboring driveway, though, so I'm glad I don't have to deal with that. I then went around the block to Berenice, and in the 6300 block, we noticed a balloon sculpture--it was someone's 21st birthday, and a car parked outside had a sign saying to honk, it's my birthday. I did not, but the colorful balloon rainbow made me smile. On to Addison, which was blissfully wide open, the nicest stretch of road we encountered. …And then a mile or two ahead, we encountered a FedEx truck making deliveries and blocking the road, fun, plus more construction. I took North Avenue home so I wouldn't have to deal with the Fabyan, etc. construction, and it wasn't too bad. Mom was funny; she said, this makes me feel alive! Being in the car and riding around, seeing other people, even bickering with me, it felt normal. We need a bit of that. Nothing has felt normal for months.
Oh, right. We did one more drive-by, past my uncle's old house. He lived not far from my other grandmother's house (which we also passed both ways). I only know how to come to it from North Avenue, but mom vaguely remembered how to get to it from the north. When I was in high school, mom would babysit my little cousins on Fridays when mom had off and my aunt would work, and she'd have to take M to school--she was in kindergarten around that time. She recognized one street as the street M's school was on, and then recognized a cross street as one she used to take. My mom doesn't have the best memory and her sense of direction is not great, but we managed to find our way; the trick was that they lived on the west side of a creek, and we had to find and cross it first. At that point I recognized a road name and found the old house pretty quickly--not bad considering they moved 15 years ago, and I didn't drive it myself all that much, only a few times. But I have dad's sense of direction. I did not turn down their block because it's a small dead-end with only a few houses on it, plus it was garbage day and the truck was right there. The house was a ranch when they owned it, but their buyers put a second floor on it. It had no basement. It went from a three bed, one bath ranch to having five beds and two baths. The garage seemed to be the same and was not in good shape according to mom; I couldn't really see since I was driving and cognizant of the garbage truck. She also asked if we could go down Third Street in Geneva to see what that looked like once we were closer to home. There were a few people out, but it was pretty quiet overall. We're not going to have Swedish Days (though truthfully I think I'm over that), so that's weird for mom, but we're adjusting to the new normal. What else can we do.
Our goal was to leave by 10, which we did, maybe even a few minutes early. Mom did call grandma to get a list from her of her specifics, and I did the same with dad. Mom's barely been in the car in weeks, and if she has, it's been with my dad. This was like a real treat for her. She also kept rolling down her window, so I was joking it was so she could stick her head out and pant. She was like, I'm letting the germs out! …Okay, mom. Meanwhile, it was warm enough that it was 85F by 10:30 AM, so I had the air going in the car. Can we not let the hot air in, please?
She also requested we take the scenic route, i.e., Fabyan/Washington/Geneva/St. Charles (same road, four names). She got to see some of the construction at Fabyan and Kirk, and once we hit West Chicago, naturally we got stopped by a train. As soon as that passed--and the gates came down as we approached the tracks, so we had to sit through the whole thing--we got to see that the next intersection, maybe Main Street, was all torn up. We'd hit intermittent construction the entire way down that road. It was like a slalom course at times. From there, I went 83 to North, and that was okay, but after passing my other grandma's house in Franklin Park, mom wanted to do a drive-by of her (old?) job. She works off River Road, and I'm glad she didn't have to go to work last week, as it was flooded out; she may not have been able to access it, or at least not without some sort of detour. Her job used to be about a mile north of there, but they moved about 15 years ago, and I'm not sure I've ever seen the new building and had to be like, okay, pay attention; you have to tell me where to go. (She had the sound on on her phone and her girlfriend group text was pinging as one friend had cataract surgery today.) She doesn't come up the way I did and missed the entrance, despite there being a big sign for her office park. We went around a different way, and it was fine; she said the parking lot was about half full. (Shortly after that, she got a message from dad that a FedEx envelope arrived from work--it wasn't her official layoff/termination letter, but they won't be paying her insurance any longer. She is able to apply for COBRA if she'd like. She does need to return the paperwork soon, and she was like, we were *right* there! Oops. Oh well.)
Here's the thing--River Road is under major construction. It's down to one lane, and in one place north and south traffic share the southbound lanes. It was kind of confusing. Mom's telling me, uh, you'll want to be in the left lane to turn at the light, and I'm like, uh, do you not remember how we were going northbound in the southbound lane just up ahead? I'm in the right lane for a reason! She *so* does not pay attention to things, and then was antagonistic about how I was reacting to her. (This isn't anxiety. I'm not anxious about this. I'm more frustrated at your ignorance and stupidity, thanks.) And the way the lanes were coned off, it didn't look like I could make a left onto Belmont, which would get me to the store, so now I'm having to go down to the next light at Grand so I can get across the river. That was fun. Bonus, though, was seeing Gene and Jude's, a well-known area hot dog stand that was in the news last week because it was basically an island. It was all dried out by now, and the river appeared to be at a normal level. Good. So across the river, and now over to Thatcher, and…oh goody, another train. This was a Metra making a stop, and the front car had stopped across the intersection, and someone, possibly the engineer, was sitting there looking out the window at traffic while mom called grandma to let her know we were almost at the store. The Metra guy was wearing a mask and gloves, for the record. Mom was all mad, like, I thought they weren't running the trains right now! Uh, people still need to get downtown and stuff. We could sort of see into the train cars and I counted three whole people on that train, plus one more Metra employee.
Disturbing sight of the day: North of the tracks on Thatcher, there are cemeteries on both sides of the road. My great- and great-great-grandparents are buried at St. Joseph's on the west side of the street. There was a sign on the east side: Now Hiring! …Oh, dear. That's a business you *don't* want booming right about now.
It was probably about 11:15 when we got to the store, and we made a pit stop since we didn't think we could make it the whole trip without a visit to the facilities, and we didn't want to go at grandma's since we didn't want to go into her place. Lucky for us, the bathrooms were open, though this is the fun of going potty in the C-19 era: Rich's has a hand dryer, no paper towels. How do I get out of here without touching the door handle? I realized: Use my shirt. And of course that's when mom is fiddling with her purse while I'm standing there holding the door open with my foot. Like, can you do that *outside* the bathroom? And she starts calling me names because of that. God, mom. I'm not asking you to strip naked and start kissing everyone. I asked you to step out of the bathroom. Now, we'd come in one entrance, where there were a bunch of carts; the bathroom was by the other, where we only saw hand baskets, so we each took one. She bought for grandma; I bought for dad, picking out some of the deli salads (tuna, chicken, egg, cucumber, carrot/pineapple, since it sounded intriguing), pierogi (meat, sauerkraut/mushroom, sweet cheese), a poppyseed roll, and some rye bread. I realized, between all the leftovers we currently have plus what I was buying, that we probably didn't need to go regular grocery shopping this week, so I picked myself up some yogurt to have and figured our house would be set. Mom picked up a pork chop dinner from the deli, some chicken noodle soup, some deli salads, and a loaf of Jewish rye, then met back up with me so we could find the other items. Grandma wanted a quart of milk and mom had no idea what a container of that would look like--she was looking at the half-gallons. Mom, that's too big. I didn't say it, but what she wanted was a Milk Chug sort of bottle. My aunt gave grandma a recipe for chicken thighs that was pretty easy and she's been making a lot, so we found her a package of those. She requested two bananas, not ripe, and someone happened to leave two bananas in the pile, just for us (they clearly came from a bunch but we weren't going to quibble). Lastly, two cans of frozen orange juice. It was around when we looked for the milk that mom asked if I could carry both baskets, which was fine as I figured it would balance me out. But they were kind of heavy and awkward and hard to maneuver if someone was coming at me. We each got into different lines, and I didn't realize mom moved to the one next to mine until I heard her voice. Rich's had decals on the ground that said "STAND HERE" for social distancing, which was good, and plexiglass for the checkers, which was good…but here's where you can tell it's a Polish grocery store: There were three checkout lines open right next to each other, and at one point the checker in mom's line backed up into me so our butts touched. Um…I guess it counts for social distancing if you're not facing each other? Yeah, you might want to do every other lane for safety. Plus, one girl was going around and adding bags to the checker stands and she was right there too, brushing past me like it was nothing. Yeah, okay. I had my mask on, and it's not like I'm catching anything, but God forbid I bring something over to grandma, you know?
Fun fact: They have children's books in Polish in a spinner near the door at Rich's. Gotta remember that for next time.
We got out to the car, and mom immediately set about wiping down grandma's groceries and putting them into other bags I'd brought. They'd been in our possession for more than three days, so we figured they were virus-free. While she started on that, I fixed our groceries to put all but the breads in the cooler. (I should mention that I paid for grandma's and mom paid for dad's. I had the "grandma fund" from several years ago, when we'd buy things for her and she'd insist on paying us. Well, this is perfect--I can pay for her groceries out of that. The fund had about $56 in it and the food was $41 and change, so there's still some left over if we need it. We only use it to buy stuff for her, and mainly necessities, not frivolous stuff.) Mom stayed in the back seat and called grandma to let her know we'd be there in about 10 minutes. Oh, fun, Forest Preserve Drive is under construction, yay. Now, you may recall that a very busy virus testing site is at the old emissions testing station on Forest Preserve, right by the mall. Yes, well, it turns out that FPD is blocked off east of Harlem due to that. Eastbound traffic was getting detoured north. Hmm… Since FPD is already north of grandma, I opted to go south to Irving…except of course there were a bunch of people going that same way, too, so it took a couple lights for me to turn from Harlem to Irving, and then Irving was under construction for a little bit, I believe. Sigh. All I know is that I was *not* taking Irving on the way home. I do know that mom reminded grandma to bring her shopping cart and the purple jacket downstairs with her, and grandma was appreciative of the reminder, and said she'd go grab the jacket while she was still on the phone.
Grandma was waiting in the lobby when we got there. She was funny; as soon as she noticed us, she got up from her seat, opened the door, and stuck her cart in the doorway. Uh…can we come in? We had multiple bags with us--not just the groceries, which were in four or five bags themselves, but also a Target bag from me that held my gifts (two masks, an article about masks from the newspaper, a card, and a dream catcher I found in my Papa stash that matched the card I gave her), plus a big Trader Joe's bag from mom which held whatever mom was giving her. We did go into the lobby, where the mail lady was; grandma must've mentioned she was waiting for someone, and when mom came in and wished grandma a happy birthday, the mail lady went, you didn't tell me it was your birthday! I said, well, it's tomorrow. :P So then the mail lady wished her a happy birthday, which was sweet. I mean, grandma's clearly a little old lady at this point, and she's that age where people are kind purely due to that. Also, grandma had two bags of her own to give to us, so we had to take those out of the cart first. We got everything situated, and mom was like, what's this shirt? It was draped over the cart's handle. Mom, that's your purple jacket! Duh. It's been so long, she forgot what it looked like, apparently. The two of them started talking, and I pulled out my phone--I'd wanted a picture of us. I know grandma wouldn't purposely pose, but this birthday is something else and I wanted to remember it. I hope grandma lives at least as long as her mom--she passed away at 95--but you never know. I got a few selfies of us in the lobby, all wearing masks, just to prove that we did see her. Plus, I mean, I had to know what was going on with grandma's hair. She will never let go of her vanity and not being able to have her hair done is probably the hardest part of this for her. To wit, one of the items in mom's bag was her old set of hot rollers; this way grandma, who complains of her stick-straight hair (and is very jealous of my wavy curls), could try to curl her hair herself. We were curious what she'd do; mom suspected she'd be wearing a wig. As we walked up to the door and I could see her sitting on the bench in the lobby, I went, is she wearing a turban? That's really what it looked like, but she'd taken a green scarf and wound it around her head. I could see her red hair sticking out at her crown as that wasn't covered…but at the middle of her forehead, I could see her natural white. You have to zoom in pretty far, but you can see that in at least one of my three pictures. Also, there are mirrors on the walls in the lobby, and in one of the pictures, it's like, what's on grandma's head? It looked like a flowerpot or something. It ended up being the reflection; the red surrounded by the green had that effect. Funny.
We didn't stay too long, only about five minutes, and we blew kisses to each other as grandma took her cart to the elevator. It was nice to see her, and we'll call tomorrow for her actual birthday. We went today because it's her normal day to get groceries delivered, and this way she could decide if she still wanted more stuff or if this would keep her for the next week. Also, weather-wise, scattered storms were predicted all week, and today's weather looked better. (It did work out--we hit no rain during our travails, and it did rain after we returned home. It's supposed to rain for a good portion of tomorrow, and the storms possibly will be severe.) Since I already was going down to Addison, mom suggested we drive past our old house to check it out. I didn't get a 100% look at it since I was driving, but there's a pretty rose bush next to the front door, and the neighboring property has two big evergreens along the driveway. It's the corner house and our driveways are adjacent (unusual for that block), so it's almost like the trees are on our old property. They're practically crowding the neighboring driveway, though, so I'm glad I don't have to deal with that. I then went around the block to Berenice, and in the 6300 block, we noticed a balloon sculpture--it was someone's 21st birthday, and a car parked outside had a sign saying to honk, it's my birthday. I did not, but the colorful balloon rainbow made me smile. On to Addison, which was blissfully wide open, the nicest stretch of road we encountered. …And then a mile or two ahead, we encountered a FedEx truck making deliveries and blocking the road, fun, plus more construction. I took North Avenue home so I wouldn't have to deal with the Fabyan, etc. construction, and it wasn't too bad. Mom was funny; she said, this makes me feel alive! Being in the car and riding around, seeing other people, even bickering with me, it felt normal. We need a bit of that. Nothing has felt normal for months.
Oh, right. We did one more drive-by, past my uncle's old house. He lived not far from my other grandmother's house (which we also passed both ways). I only know how to come to it from North Avenue, but mom vaguely remembered how to get to it from the north. When I was in high school, mom would babysit my little cousins on Fridays when mom had off and my aunt would work, and she'd have to take M to school--she was in kindergarten around that time. She recognized one street as the street M's school was on, and then recognized a cross street as one she used to take. My mom doesn't have the best memory and her sense of direction is not great, but we managed to find our way; the trick was that they lived on the west side of a creek, and we had to find and cross it first. At that point I recognized a road name and found the old house pretty quickly--not bad considering they moved 15 years ago, and I didn't drive it myself all that much, only a few times. But I have dad's sense of direction. I did not turn down their block because it's a small dead-end with only a few houses on it, plus it was garbage day and the truck was right there. The house was a ranch when they owned it, but their buyers put a second floor on it. It had no basement. It went from a three bed, one bath ranch to having five beds and two baths. The garage seemed to be the same and was not in good shape according to mom; I couldn't really see since I was driving and cognizant of the garbage truck. She also asked if we could go down Third Street in Geneva to see what that looked like once we were closer to home. There were a few people out, but it was pretty quiet overall. We're not going to have Swedish Days (though truthfully I think I'm over that), so that's weird for mom, but we're adjusting to the new normal. What else can we do.