Back to Normal

    My mother's life would not have matched what most people would have considered a standard of excellence. But she never complained about what she lacked, and as years went by she did not aspire to more than she already possessed.
    She lived in her own house, still planted a garden, though each season it dwindled in size, and she had her animals, her pet dogs,  some cats, a few chickens, and her proudest achievement of owning ponies---for the grandchildren she would say, but she had a lifelong love of members of the horse family.
   She wholeheartedly participated in hosting Christmas celebrations, used to have piles of presents for the grandkids under the tree, which she ordered through Sears and Ward's mail-order catalogs. She would prepare Thanksgiving dinner for whatever family members were available to attend.
    So one might say she always arose to whatever occasion, some joyful, some sad, an array of  birthday parties, holiday celebrations, weddings  and, yes, wakes and funerals. Through it all, the happiness and the tears, the gains and the losses, there was one constant. She would, and did, say it herself, and repeatedly:  she couldn't wait for "things to get back to normal." 
     That meant she wanted to be in her daily routine, in her own home, her family around her, her favored terrier always nearby, and each day as familiar as the next. She always looked forward to getting back to normal. And she would get there, whether it meant cleaning up the kitchen after a holiday meal,  taking down the Christmas tree and picking up all the wrapping paper, or writing thank you messages to those who had commiserated in her grief, she cleared all the details and settled back to her longed-for state of normalcy.  That seems such a modest request.
    She spent her last normal day on a Saturday in late October, a day on which nothing very spectacular happened. In the early morning hours of the following day, Sunday, "getting back to normal" came to an end.