Past, future, presents

Me and my sister Beth

The Peaceable is far, far away from here.
Here is Apollo, Pennsylvania, a little post-industrial rural area in the United States of America. This is the town where my parents grew up, where I did some growing-up, too, a place I could return to someday, if I wanted to. Here everyone is friendly and polite, if a little rough around the edges. It is easy to be here. I know where to find the library (the library where my mom signed a paper so I could see books kept on the "forbidden" shelves), the St. James Catholic Church, the pub with the best white pizza, the Dairy Queen where I sat in a Sunbeam Tiger sports car with my first boyfriend and drank in the glories of the mocha milkshake... three decades back. Apollo is my hometown. My mother and sister and former in-laws still live here. Apollo is my past.
I spent the weekend at a hotel in Toledo, Ohio, another place from my past. Toledo is where my children were raised, where I dug in and flowered as a newspaper journalist, where I met and married a wise-ass Englishman called Paddy O'Gara. Toledo is where my son Philip met a very pretty girl called Raheela. More than a decade later, after our family broke up and scattered to places all over the world, Philip and Raheela called us all back to Toledo again for their big wedding celebration.
.....
And so Philip was enfolded into the noisy embrace of his new wife's people.
And so the two of them zipped off into their future in a stretch limo, with a scheduled stop on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls for a couple of days.
Monday morning we headed back east to Apollo, where I am now until Thursday. From the future back to the past, where the next big event was a drive down Dime Road to visit Barbara.
Barb is my favourite cousin, another person from the past, particularly beloved. She taught me to neck-rein a horse, how to help a dog birth pups, how to turn a Jeep to four-wheel drive, how to knock down a shot of bourbon and not choke. She drives steamrollers and forklifts for a living, and builds dry-stone retaining walls on the weekends. She can set vertical fence-posts on a sheer hillside and shoot a .44, and tell a lowlife to go straight to hell. But she knows how to pray, too. She's praying a lot these days.
Barb has cancer in the bones of her spine and the organs of her abdomen.
I went to see her this morning. She does not look like Barb at all. I held her hands. I never noticed before how elegant her hands are. She is very small, she is in a great deal of pain.
I will probably not see her again.
She is the future, too. Most of my family dies of cancer eventually. We fight and medicate and suffer, but it gets us in the end. Cancer or old age or accident, something gets us, all of us, in the end. Aside from the suffering, there is nothing to feel too badly about. Everybody goes.
Me, too. I go home on Thursday, via Charlotte. On Friday I will be home in Moratinos, the tiny pueblo. My present.


(I promise to post more photos. I have a new computer and have not figured out how to move things around comfortably.)