Thursday, 27 July, Tallahassee to Rockville, where chaos reigns
Written 28 July 2017
As agreed, the Westminster Oaks van arrived to ferry us to the airport right on time. (This is a wonderful new service of the retirement community we've moved to; $30 for a ride to the airport, so long as it's during regular business hours. That's about $18 dollars less than a taxi, far more reliable, and no tipping!) Our flights to BWI went perfectly smoothly, and the reason is now clear—we've obviously soaked up all the good karma in the world, leaving none at all for the Sinnetts.
Ev's mother recently passed away after a long and difficult decline, so this year when he and Rachel traveled to Maine for the usual getaway at the family compound on Bailey Island—usually a couple of weeks of family reunion, relaxation, fishing, and eating—they instead left the kids and their families to enjoy the pleasures of the island and met Ev's brother and sister-in-law (Chan and Kathy) in Portland to empty their mother's house (their own childhood home)—full basement, two floors, attic, and full two-car garage. Even after untold hours and days of prep work by Chan and Kathy, that meant 10 days, dawn to dusk, of grueling physical labor and emotional turmoil as they worked their way through the accumulations of a 67-year marriage, making endless fraught decisions about what to keep and to whom it should go. Third brother Jay was not present but contributed by e-mail.
Unfortunately, that kind of thing takes its toll, and after a few days of preliminary skirmishes, Ev's alimentary tract, with which he enjoys an uneasy truce at the best of times, went into full armed insurrection. He nonetheless stuck to the plan, which was for him to drive a loaded 20-foot rental truck south to Maryland, dropping off items from the house at various addresses along the way, while Rachel drove the van (also loaded to the gunwales) to yet other addresses. Ev was not in good shape at this point, but he valiantly (not Rachel's term for it) carried on, not wanting to disrupt the schedules of other family members, most notably the nephew who was on his way to Maryland to meet him and take the truck on to South Carolina.
He made it, but daughter Carolyn (young CJ of our previous travel diaries) met him at the house and drove him straight to the emergency room, where they clapped him in the hospital for a couple of nights for intravenous rehydration and stabilization and a CT scan, which fortunately turned up nothing untoward. We were delighted to learn on Tuesday that he was home and that his doctor approved his going to Russia this coming Sunday.
Then Rachel, herself understandably under great stress, was at the hair dresser on Wednesday when she, too, developed abdominal pain and digestive distress and was rushed off to the hospital in an ambulance. The paramedics found her lying on the floor and asked in alarm whether she had fallen. No, she replied, she had lain down because she'd learned from years of dealing with recurring vertigo that it was the best course of action. You cannot, she explained, fall off the floor.
She also had a CT scan and was diagnosed with mesenteric panniculitis, apparently a very broad catch-all description. Fortunately, she too is fine, if eating rather cautiously. She and Ev both have doctor's appointments today (Friday), but it's looking as though the trip (departure on Sunday) is still on for both of them. Whew!
Needless to say, things were a little chaotic when we arrived yesterday. Rachel had not had a chance to do any of the things she had planned to prepare for our arrival or the trip to Russia, so she prevailed on close friend Joyce Budman (mother of our 2005 sabbatical house sitter, Jason) to pick us up at the airport. The plan was for all of us to dine at the Budmans' anyway, so we went straight there and Ev, Rachel, Carolyn, her baby Kay, and the Budmans' daughter and her family joined us for a festive family dinner. Jason, alas, was working (he's a DJ), as was CJ's husband Jeff. Joyce entertains on the same scale Rachel does, so we had appetizers (smoked salmon with cream cheese and mustard-dill sauce, chips, spinach dip, triscuits, two kinds of cheese, shrimp with cocktail sauce, and Ranier cherries) followed by roasted rack of lamb, chicken stromboli, cold roast turkey, roasted asparagus and corn on the cob, and a huge caprese salad. Dessert was a chocolate cream tort from Costco (outstanding), strawberries, blackberries, and more cherries. Since the Budman's were leaving town the next day, lots of the leftovers came home with us, to Rachel's relief, since she hadn't had time to shop.