Labor Day already??!!

It’s the evening of September 4th, Labor Day evening. We had London Broil and baked potatoes for dinner. It was a nice dinner, but the thought that summer is over and everyone is going back to regular work schedules. Not that it matters any more, but kids are going back to school. It’s so mind blowing. The dishwasher is humming and gurgling in the background, it was 90 degrees today. The mosquitoes seem to be out in full force, yet the summer is over. I dread the winter. I’m always cold, my skin is dry and if I don’t moisturize I itch. I know I sound like a whiny little girl. ( I’m sorry to all the whiny little girls out there, but I’m in mourning over the end of summer. Really summer started its exit, in the lower north east of the United States way back in the last ten days of July. We were still getting hot days and even the nights were rough. That is until around July 20th or so. Somewhere around there we got a cool night. I remember noticing it. I tried to ignore it. I didn’t even want to write about it. I hoped if I ignored it, it’d go away. But just like Nastia and the internet, it didn’t go away. It just kept on coming.

I remember as a young kid never understanding why the pool got cold in August. You know, I thought, maybe the pool was tired of summer too and wanted to close for the season. No, it was just one of the many hints that God leaves us to signal things are changing. Things don’t happen without a warning, I’ve come to realize. You get the hot summer days, but the nights get cool and the pool along with it. If you look close along the sides of the road in August, you’ll even see some leaves start to change. I remember when we had the milk trailers behind Bill Vines’ office in West Nyack. There was this big old willow tree that leaned up against the back of one of the trailers. Every August, some time after the nights started to get cool, the flat bed in front of the trailer would become littered with these small narrow leaves from the tree. They’d cover the flatbed and if you weren’t thinking about the future, you’d wonder what the heck is going on. Did the tree die? It didn’t, it was just quietly announced that summer was up and leaving, heading south for the holidays. Over the last two weeks life has gone on beyond the palisades. Elena was sick on a Wednesday, about three weeks ago. She calls in sick. Later in the day, after work hours are finished, she goes over Matts. As a kid, I was taught if you are sick, you stay home, even if you are feeling better. She didn’t.

The next Wednesday, she called in sick again, but she was not sick. Teri and I try to tell her she is risking her job by doing this. If you all remember back to being that age, some of you don’t because you are that age, but at that age you are very smart, you know it all. She didn’t want to hear it and walked away going upstairs as we tried to talk to her. I texted her and told her she was very disrespectful to us and we were just trying to let her know how it is out there. Her reply is she knows how it is out there. I didn’t want to get into a text war with her so I let it go. Her actions made it clear she is at the age where she is very smart because she knows it all and you can’t argue with someone that smart. Sometime around this time she also decides to sleep over Matts two nights in a row. It felt like we should prepare for her to move in with Matt, which would be a major mistake. Teri has told me Elena plans to follow Matt if he gets a job away from this area. So yeah, maybe we might just need to prepare for losing her. The week she slept over Matt’s I didn't see her from Wednesday until maybe Sunday. Nastia and I talked about her moving out. I told her she and Sean, who moved in officially this past week (I’ll get to it a little later) will want more privacy and will move out most likely within a year. I said she’d start coming over most every day. Then something would come up, like, I don’t know, maybe life and suddenly it’d be every other day, once every third day, once a week. You know how it goes. There’ll be phone calls and when will you come by. I can’t, the baby, bring them, it’s too much hassle, plus you said you didn’t want to be a babysitter years ago. Blah, blah, blah and so on until one day…So that is why I try to see my mother as often as possible. I’ll still have regrets, like with my dad, but hopefully less. Yes, Sean moved it at the end of August. He sleeps in the same bed as Nastia. They both pay three hundred dollars a month for the privilege. Their room is next to ours so nothing, most likely goes on in there and if it does, it’s not something I could or would stop. I’d just hope they’d be quiet. This is Nastia’s first step toward moving out, growing up a little. I know some people might get bent out of shape with what we are allowing, but there are extenuating circumstances, plus there is a responsibility she has to take care of. They can’t stay together if they don’t pay. Sean started staying here at the house every day about two, three weeks ago and Nastia has been with him every moment. With her broken leg he helps her do things. She hasn’t gotten on his nerves yet, so more power to them.