TIME MARCHES ON

Meaning, she is losing more strength in her legs and also arms now too. Bonnie has to help her both in and out of the car now. Her mind is becoming less clear. Well, hard to tell, granted, since it's tended to flit all over the place since I've known her but still. She panicks more now, obsesses even more over things that aren't really worth getting your knickers in a knot over. We've just had an entire day now devoted to:

"WHERE ARE ALL THE LETTERS I WORTE TO MY MOTHER???"

Meaning the letters she wrote, to her mother, in the 1940s and into the 50s, and which her mother saved, catalogued by date, in 8 black loose leaf notebooks. They're 99% typed so easy to read, and the notebooks live in two beige plastic open file folder carriers from Staples. I've read every letter. Each book averages about 80 letters so, that's a lot of letters. I would take them up to bed with me when I was there to read privately. It's good stuff, most of it. I will turn them into a book one day.

Anyhow, with that in mind, I hid the notebooks, thinking Peg wouldn't miss them. Wrong. No sooner was I back in the U.K. than she was on the phone, in a state, asking where they were. I told her. She found them. Fortuately they didn't LOOK hidden, just sitting on the lower shelf of a particle board bookcase in Command Central, with five LL Bean catalogues, a rawhide dog bone and a sweater over them. You know, looking like most every other area of the house.

My big worry was that Peg would come across a letter she didn't like or which embarrassed her and would rip it out and throw it away. Which has in fact happened. But. Aha. I am not slitting my wrists over this because, thinking ahead, as I did, I secretly scanned all eight notebooks last year, whenever she was out getting her hair done or napping or glued to the Weather Channel in the other room.

Yesterday's Peg Panic was not being able to find these notebooks, again. Notebooks which, last I saw, were on the bottom shelf of the right hand bookcase as you walked into her room (formerly the livingroom), so passed on this information. Four phone calls from Bonnie and three emails later, the notebooks were discovered, right there where I said they probably were, this time with only two LL Bean catalogues on top of them, plus a big ugly painted plywood doll in a bonnet someone gave her with some dumb saying on it's apron---the kind of stuff gift stores that stink of candles sell and which you always go into thinking goody! and are always disappointed to find that it's all tat. Anyhow my mother had apparently looped the string on this gingham girlie over a book on the shelf above and--presto, Instant Hidden Letters To Mother. 

I'd even mentioned the doll in my directions, and, hurrah hurrah, four hours later, success could be reported from Becket, Mass.

I guess I need to go over there soon.