My Room at Betty's

As silly as it is (I never know what to say on camera, or even when behind the camera), I made a short clip of my bedroom at Betty's. For several days of the week, my office is my daytime home and the room at Betty's is my evening home. Betty's house is a century-plus old dairy farmhouse, with barn alongside. In my bedroom, the one lightswitch by the door turns off all the electricity to the room, so I have one battery alarm clock and one wind-up alarm clock, just to be on the safe side.
This week my husband's aunt passed away. She was his mother's sister (one of them), and we'd been half-expecting the worst for some time. Irene was a silent woman, a woman who watched and listened to others, but who almost never spoke. Like smoke dissipating from a fire, her spirit grew weaker and weaker until she just did not exist anymore. She had two daughters. Her younger daughter Carolyn is one of my "pets" and even lived with us for a while one summer. We had a great time staying up half the night playing Trivial Pursuit. Carolyn is an amputee, but she happily jumped into our backyard swimming pool with us. The boys were children, and I was a much thinner woman then. We've stayed close over the years, exchanging cards, letters, and emails.

Irene's older daughter Ethel is another story. Pregnant three times by two, maybe three, different men, she is married to yet a fourth man. She's lazy and self-centered. Maybe it's because during her childhood, the lion's share of family attention was on Carolyn because of her many health problems--I don't know. I just know that she is not half the person her sister is. Carolyn single-handedly cared for her mother for the last decade if not longer. Ethel seldom visited or helped. Carolyn doesn't drive, and Ethel does, but Carolyn could not even get Ethel to help with the doctor visits or grocery shopping. Fortunately for Carolyn, she became involved with a church that has returned the devotion she's given to them, and they have helped her with all the many issues she's dealt with, even helping her and her mother move from their rented house back to their old homeplace.

My husband and I are once again in the awkward position of being unable to go to Louisiana at short notice, so rather than try to go to Louisiana for the funeral, we've made plans to return to Louisiana during the latter four days of my spring break in March. (We'll fly down to save time.) We'll try to spend some time with Carolyn and with my mother-in-law then, and if possible, I'll try to see my family in Jena. There won't be much time, but they'd be upset if I didn't try to visit them.

On a less sad note, I managed to survive a bad week at school, weather-wise, with another heavy snow coming tonight and tomorrow. I've been on the verge of getting a cold, but so far, I'm just "sinusy" (which really adds to the vertigo I've been experiencing). My husband and I headed to the grocery store to stock up on food in case we can't get out of the house tomorrow or Sunday, and now I've got a huge beef stew simmering in the oven. Nothing like comfort food when the weather outside is frightful!