Tikkun Olam

(nabloppmo day 9) I am writing this post erev Shabbat* from sunny south_______, where I am (suddenly!) here visiting two of my kids, my son-in-law, and three of my grandkids.  This is a last-minute gift from someone (thank you, D.!) who has a heart of gold.  So on 3 days notice I packed, called old friends to see if we can get together, and--arrived today, around 4:00 p.m. local time.  It is a very, very short visit: five full days, two half-days of travel.  Better a short visit, than no visit, I say.  I will get to see my mom-in-law whom I haven't seen in at least a year and who is approaching her 89th birthday ( ad me'ah ve-esrim shanah *), and although these two daughters came with the grandkids for Pesach *, I was pretty sick then with a bout of bronchitis, didn't go with them to the mountains on their sledding trip on chol ha-mo'ed *, and didn't have much energy for anything (let alone "making Pesach," which my husband did almost entirely by himsel...

It is raining a coldish, shivery spring rain.  I am sitting here at the computer in my “office”--the room which I still call ‘C----‘s room’--by the window, listening to the rain pouring down the downspout against the brick outer wall of our townhome and onto the ground. In fact, I am consciously calling this room by that name, that is: the room of my youngest child, and I stop myself when I find myself beginning to say ‘my office’ when I refer to it either to friends, or even to my husband. I know I wrote sometime back that I am metamorphosing as a mother; that I am beginning to accept my children as adults, as well as my role as grandmother to my grandkids.  But that is not the whole truth, only just…most of it. There is still a small part of me that does not want to make that final, emotional leap out of the past and into the future by calling the room in which my youngest daughter spent a very small fraction of her life, actually—she was here in this townhome where we ...