Sweetness and Pain at 500

I spent last night at my mother's.

Around 8 am, I got this text message from my husband:

Miss M. slept all night in her
own bed. She said that she
dreamed you were walking in
the sky smiling down at her.
Two more chicks hatched
overnight. I'm leaving for the
city at 2:30.

It totally made my day. Every morning, I ask her if she had any dreams. Usually she says no, and sometimes she claims to have dreamed about a stuffed animal (which always sounds like she's trying to shut me up by just telling me something). But the night I wasn't there? She dreamed of me. Of course, if I had been there, she wouldn't have had to dream me up because she would have climbed into our bed at some point and wrapped her limpet self around me.

Meanwhile, I didn't sleep well at all. I was up in the middle of the night making lists and notes for my sister to use when she met with the hospice intake nurse. Eventually I went back to bed, and fell asleep, only to have the alarm wake me up from a vivid dream in which two of my teeth had spontaneously crumbled into tiny shards.

My sister and brother and sister-in-law - and my mother - met with the hospice nurse this morning. Tomorrow, they'll deliver a hospital bed and portable toilet and wheelchair and oxygen. She's barely eating, and sleeping a lot. She fell yesterday and couldn't get up, and either sprained or broke her ankle in the process. She's not even reading the paper anymore, much less railing about grammatical errors in the Times or malfeasance on the part of hospital administrators.

Calling hospice in wasn't an easy call, but it was an inevitable one. And it's kind of a relief.

* * * * * * * * *

This is my 500th post. How did this happen? Thank you all for reading and commenting and being.