December 7/Full Moon

Silver Polish, communal living, gift idea for you.

For today’s Full Moon post, in the section called “Silver Polish” below, I am picking up something that I started and didn’t finish a month back. I have a few more unfinished drafts like the one below that I will bring in to the newsletter as this lunation winds up. Tonight at 10:08pm the moon comes to full and I am claiming that energy, that alignment in time and space, for the processing of old things and unfinished stories.

Here we are in 2016 when it was Mom, Bill, Rachel’s family and mine all living in the Big House. This is at Christmastime when Becka and fam are visiting too.

Yoga Poetry Radio Update

I haven’t had the capacity to do the yoga podcasts. For those of you that were listening, I am sorry that I have not been showing up. Maybe there is something in the archives for you? There will be more coming as I have more time. Also gift idea: give a month of moon meditations to someone you think would enjoy it. Only $8 and it doesn’t add clutter, won’t end up in a landfill, and will transform their life and break them away free from everyday time.

Below is the post where I gather all the moon meditations into one post, just to make things simple. Time your month long gift to the next new moon on December 23, which is also very close to Solstice, December 21. Thank you for helping others yoga lovers, caregivers, readers and people who care about the state of this world to find my work. And thank you so much for reading.

New Moon/November 23

silver polish

I polished a silver bracelet while traveling last week. Josh looked up how to do it before my Lyft picked me up at 6:40 am, and I packed a tiny Tupperware with a tablespoon of baking soda and took it with me on the road. Mom always had a jar of silver polished she used for her silver trays and pitcher. When she first moved to the Big House she would do it regularly. Once a week? I don’t actually remember, but I know she would bring the silver over to the kitchen sink and polish them up. It was a routine that I knew she enjoyed. It wasn’t something that I appreciated at the time. When we first moved altogether in the big house, we were trying to sort out spaces that were not quite big enough for all of us and her silver platter vision of living in the house didn’t match my homey-comfort-cats-and-dogs-living-happily-under-one-roof vibe.

Now that we no longer live in the big house, the rest of them that do seem to manage to have both these days. For more of a history, read this post. And this post. I think there may be another that I will link here when I can find it.

It was hard to have a live and let live attitude when we all moved in to the house because there was so much desire and expectation wrapped up in being there. It was a big deal to buy a house together. My sister and I had different financial relationships to Mom and Bill and we were all leaving situations we loved behind.

Mom was leaving not only the condo she loved in Oakland but the Conservancy. Those were hard times. I had hoped when we moved in that the truth of her memory loss would set her free. That being able to claim the deficiancies in her brain and shrug them off would allow her to live her life with joy and pleasure. And I think in many ways, she did. But she wasn’t able to be public about it and would do a lot of pretending, which worked because she is amazing, but had its own wear and tear, and sometimes didn’t allow Rachel and I to tell the stories of how we got where we did.

I wrote about it a bit that other time linked above, this grasping that mom did, for privacy. To fake it and pass as normal. A similar grasping happened with her stuff in the house. As we moved in together we all had to give up things and space became an issue, and with her brain changing that conflict lived all the larger in her mind.

The silver became an emblem of it. There was a table she liked to keep it on in the dining room. The house was jam packed with furniture from all of our houses, all of our lives, and all I wanted was for her to give a little somewhere, somehow. Well, it was not going to be with her silver. Or her china cabinet. Or the antique couch. You can see how this was.

There was the woman’s basketball couch who was diagnosed at the same time mom came to live with us, Pat Summit. I had hoped her famous struggle with the disease would make it more publicly acceptable, but that didn’t happen. Rachel read her memoir, but she fell out of peoples awareness as her decease progressed. There was an announcement recently that Bruce Willis had aphasia, which has been the biggest struggle for mom as the disease progressed, and I thought we would learn more. But I hadn’t heard much about him since.

But I am turning a new leaf now and polishing some of my silver, sometimes. At least a bracelet and a pair of earrings. I tried with a fancy old fork from Josh’s family, but it makes me think I need a tub of polish instead of our googled way for better results. The standing at the sink and using a cloth to rub away the tarnish makes me feel a little closer to her.

During the pandemic I could be a big support. She was worried about Grandma and I could help her stay in contact. I was able to care for both my living matriarchs at once. But for now my role is supporting Bill when he has the opportunities to do things. And Mom remains the same. Find the most recent update here.

Much love, Tina.