Summer

We just celebrated the summer solstice in North Carolina and the longest day of the year.  I don't want to think about the shorter days to come because I'm just getting into the swing of summer.

The days start early usually with a morning walk around the lake. The cool mountain air, sweetness of wild honeysuckle bushes, the loamy smell of lake water mixed with the scent of freshly mown grass embraces me each morning.  Mist rises off the still water of the lake as the sun comes up.  All around me is the cacophony of trilling, cooing, whistling, and chirping birds against the distant whooshing sound of traffic. It feels like an oasis in the middle of a growing city. I walk past the beach at one end of the lake where the leftover castles and moats dug yesterday by children are still visible in the sand. Plastic buckets and shovels, beach towels, and “noodles” lie abandoned. The regular early morning joggers and dog walkers pass me on the trail with a nod or a "good morning". Many are plugged into IPods and IPhones . I never understand why they want to block out the sounds of nature.

Summer makes me want to be outdoors most of the time.  I can’t focus on an indoor project except for cooking which is a necessity.  But even that involves my herb garden in pots on the deck.  This year I have thick curly parsley to pick from, two pots of thriving basil, thyme that survived the winter indoors, rosemary, tarragon, oregano, mint, dill, and even lavender for delicious sweet scent.  Before starting lunch or supper, I grab my scissors and am out the door to decide which herbs I will add to what I am making.  Most of the time I don’t follow a recipe but experiment instead. Picking my own fresh herbs is so satisfying.

I have replaced heavy soups I made in the winter with a summer salads. I try new recipes constantly – everything from arugula, corn, and tomato salad to quinoa, to pasta vegetable salad to farro salad with beans and feta. We keep the pitcher with green tea full in the refrigerator and the Filipino basket on the kitchen counter piled with fresh fruit especially after trips to the Farmer’s Market.  We haven't eaten so well in years – not since the days we shopped at the outdoor feria in Santiago, Chile or headed to the Carrefour in Dubai where fresh fruits and vegetables from every conceivable country in the world were for sale.  In Manila and Costa Rica we ate locally grown pineapples, papayas, and mangoes.  But summer in Western North Carolina is rich in with farm-grown fruits and vegetables.

Summer brings sudden thunderstorms and showery rains.  On weekdays the drone of mowers permeates the neighborhood and in the evenings you can hear the whirring and clicking of sprinklers watering the pristine lawns.  The compulsion to be outdoors makes me take a lawn chair into the shade and read for an afternoon or write in my journal.  There are still hours of daylight once the dinner dishes are in the dishwasher. We can walk the surrounding streets, watching the new houses go up, perhaps meet a new neighbor, or catch up with ones we already know.

Summer is when we go to classical music concerts at the Brevard Music Center. We can be outdoors as we did last Sunday watching Keith Lockhart of the Boston Pops conduct the summer Brevard Orchestra playing works by Ravel and Rachmaninoff.  Brevard is the Tanglewood of the southeast and has become a much anticipated part of our summer in Western North Carolina. Our summer also  means going to Flat Rock Playhouse in Hendersonville to see favorite shows like the recent “My Fair Lady”.  

While I love the long days of summer, I realized recently that they don’t make as much difference as when I lived a thousand miles north in Vermont. There, the long summer and short winter days were more dramatically contrasted.  We looked forward all year to more daylight.
  The summer solstice is the official beginning of summer and, no matter where I live, I like the change and all that comes with it.   Right now,  I want to be immersed in summer activities and nature around me.  I am not ready to think about fall or winter. But, as summer moves on towards fall, I know there will come a day when I'll be ready and eager for the next season.  I always am.

Angelica

            “Good morning…Pase... (come in)…” Angelica greets me with her lovely broad smile as I let myself in through the lower back door of her two-story split-level home.  I am only 5 feet 4 inches tall and I tower over Angelica.  She is short and stocky with shoulder length dark hair and black eyes that sparkle when she smiles.  Each Monday morning I drive the 3 miles from my house to tutor her in English.  When I walk in,  I am enveloped in her warm Mexican hospitality that reminds me why I do this.

            Angelica or “Angie” as she calls herself with Americans, lives in a quiet lower middle class neighborhood with neat small houses  The lower level is a finished basement where she used to have a children's day care. There are built in shelves everywhere still full of toys, many of which she gladly loaned me when Noah, my great nephew, came to visit recently.   The room is nicely carpeted and painted.  There is a table and two chairs and a whiteboard against one wall. This has become our English classroom.  She and her family bought this house two years ago after 10 years of renting apartments all around Asheville.  They came to the U.S. when the children were still in elementary school. While the children speak English like natives, her husband is fluent enough to work as a mechanic. But Angelica has lagged behind in English. taking care of the family, working nights at hotels and motels as a cleaning woman interacting mostly with Spanish speaking people.  She knows that to get a better job she has to improve her English.  Hers is the American immigrant story that you hear so often but it is not one I knew firsthand.

            “How is your family?” I ask each week, to which she often replies “fine... fine.”  She immediately counters with, “How is your mother?  And your grandson?”  Family is the most important thing and we’ve learned quite a bit about each other in 13 months.  I get her to tell me whatever is on her mind in English although sometimes in her enthusiasm and desire to communicate she will launch into Spanish.  I, of course, can understand her perfectly.  But I have to force myself to insist “ say it in English” even though I’d love to just sit and chat in Spanish.  Telling me things in English slows her down but does not discourage her searching to find the right words.  These “teaching moments” when I explain new vocabulary that she jots down in her notebook, make me feel useful.

            Mornings are quiet at Angelica’s house as her husband, Angel is at work at the service department of the VW dealer.  Their driveway is full of cars her husband fixes for private clients in the evenings and on weekends to earn extra money. Her daughter Viridiana, who is 23, is at her office job and younger son Jose is sleeping in after working late hours as a chef at the popular Stone Ridge Tavern.  She has confided to me how much she would love her children to start community college but there is no money for that.  Angelica is a cleaning maid at the Western North Carolina Health Services Clinic where she works part time in the afternoons.  A close-knit family with the adult children living at home and helping their parents as most Hispanics do, they are the hard working and committed to making a better life in the United States.

            Once we have “checked up” on each other's families, I can move on to the lesson planned for the day using the materials from the Literacy Council.  Angelica is nearly always prepared with her homework and has become so comfortable with me that she asks many questions.  For her, each new thing she learns is taking a step closer to understanding American culture.  And she genuinely gets excited when she learns something new. Last week in our unit on celebrations she found out  that it is an American custom to send thank you notes when people give you a gift especially for weddings and graduations.  She was amazed and told me "we never do that in Mexico."

            During our year together I have learned about her childhood in a suburb of Mexico City going to work when she was 14 in a neighborhood bakery handing over all her earnings to her mother.  Married at a young age, there were difficulties with a husband who drank too much and whom she couldn’t always rely on. When they moved to the U.S., she told me, the drinking stopped and her husband began working hard to make ends meet. Our textbook units and new vocabulary lead to many personal reminiscences like recounting the difficult pregnancy and birth of her son Jose. Or she has shared about the hard times when her husband was diagnosed with cancer and out of work for many months. When she talks about her house and the neighborhood where she now lives I learned that when they bought the house the neighbors were parking in their driveway and using their fenced in back yard for their dogs. They resented having to give this up and took their time about moving cars and dogs even though the house had been sold.  I suspect they simply chose to ignore Angelica's family because they are Mexicans in a white neighborhood.  As Mexican immigrants they walk a fine line between what legal rights they have and how much they want to draw attention to themselves.  Americans aren’t always understanding or patient with foreigners and Mexicans live with many stereotypes.

            The weeks go by quickly and Angelica has made progress scoring higher this year on the Literacy exam and graduating to an Intermediate High level of language learning. Recently she told me excitedly that her work schedule had changed to afternoons from night work which means she now gets to interact more with English speakers and not just with the other maintenance workers who who are all Hispanic.  "I can practice more," she tells me with excitement.

              I took the training course to be a Literacy Council Volunteer ESL tutor when we moved to Asheville 3 years ago  because I craved  having some interaction with foreigners and particularly Hispanics.   I was born and raised in Latin America and I miss the warmth of Latin people and their culture. It is a side of me most people wouldn’t understand, but being comfortable with Latin culture,  is part of who I am. I have never shared with Angelica the fact that my father was an American diplomat in Mexico City for 3 years and my parents lived in a  large modern home behind high walls and tall wooden gate. with a complete staff of household help including chauffeur and gardener.  I visited there numerous times before I was married.  Ironically Art and I were even married for a second time in that very elegant house with some of my parents high society Mexican friends attending whom we didn't even know.  But that is a whole other story from many years ago.
              Right now knowing her and helping Angelica learn English keeps me going back for more.  I love being her maestra but I have also gained an insight in what it means to be a Mexican immigrant in the United States today. It is not an easy life.

          

Navigating Old Age

            “Look,” I said to Art, “there’s a New York Times on the lawn next door!”  For most people that wouldn’t be worth commenting on but I was looking for clues to who our new neighbors might be. I hoped they’d be quiet, intelligent, friendly but not too intrusive….just pleasant.

“That’s a good sign,” I said feeling some relief.  “It might mean we’ll have something in common when we meet them.”

            Several weeks ago we heard that the townhouse next door had sold after a year on the market.  It has been empty much of the time we’ve lived at Black Horse Run because the previous owners were in California and only used it two weeks out of the year.  Naturally we speculated as to who might move in.  Our front porches are side by side and we’d not had neighbors this close before. 

One day, there was a car in the driveway and I met the daughter and son-in-law and learned more.  Our new neighbors are elderly, in their 80’s, and moving from Florida to be close to their daughter and son-in-law who moved to Biltmore Lake from Seattle.  (All roads from everywhere must lead to Asheville. This is a familiar scenario here.)  “My Dad is not well,” she told me, “and if my mother is left alone I want her to be close to me.”

            While chatting from our front porches the daughter told me, “I am the daughter…the eldest…and the caregiver for my parents.”  Then she hesitated as if she wanted to add more. It all sounded very familiar.  I told her she didn’t need to explain because I had moved my mother to Asheville after we moved here, too. I am her caregiver.  I jokingly suggested we start a caregivers support group and she told me seriously she was on the verge of doing just that. She went on to explain, “We’re my parents landlords now because we bought this place. We live a few blocks over in a big house but perhaps someday when we are old we’ll move in here.”

            I never imagined I would be a caregiver for an elderly parent.  Many of my generation feel the same. I can remember my father declaring proudly, “we can take care of ourselves…we’ve saved and planned and we don’t need help from anyone.” He was a self-made man who became successful with no help from family.  Early in his retirement years he chose an expensive life care retirement community in Chapel Hill where it is easy to imagine moving seamlessly from independent living to assisted living to nursing home care all on the same campus.  When his health declined and he could no longer make decisions, I was the one who stepped in to help my mother.  When he died, there was no family in Chapel Hill. Mother readily agreed to come to Asheville.

 I, too, am a daughter, the eldest and steeped in a lifetime of “doing the right thing”.  Mother is now nearing 95 and lives in an assisted living facility near me where she has help with daily tasks.  She has often said, “I never imagined I’d live so long.”  When I am with her she will take my hand in hers and lovingly tell me “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”  I almost want to reply out loud that I don’t know what she’d do without me either...but I don’t say it.

There are so many clichés batted around that quip “growing old is not for sissies” or “ageing is mind over matter” or “you are as old as you feel”.  It all makes it sound easy but it’s not.  The reality is that unlike most cultures in the world we do not have an extended family network in place to care for and respect the elderly in our American society. Our culture reveres youth. We are good at building institutions for old age living but I have learned in the years as a caregiver to my parents that in no way does this substitute or go far enough in what is needed in old age.  Family is what counts.

We have now met Barbara and Tom Browne, our new 82-year old neighbors from Florida. Tom has entertaining life stories to tell of being a CEO of his own company and living in France for many years. But the conversations turn serious when he talks of exposure to chemicals in factories he ran that have affected his health.  Barbara is peppy and enthusiastic as she tells us matter-of-factly that this is their twentieth move!  Tom sits in the garage on his walker and smokes his pipe or likes to sit on the back deck watching the busy traffic go by on Lake Drive.  Barbara is often up at the clubhouse already immersing herself in friendly bridge games.  I like to see their daughter’s car in the driveway as she comes over daily to check up on things and help out.  It is a nice arrangement and working for that family.

            Knowing the time commitment and patience that goes along with helping elderly parents cope makes me wonder who will care for me.  Like my father, I want to say, “but of course, I’m prepared to care for myself.” as I’d never want to be a burden on my son and daughter-in-law.  I now have first-hand experience letting go of things in my own life and being there for my mother when she needs me. I wouldn’t have it any other way.  I suspect my new neighbor’s daughter and son-in-law feel exactly the same and there is some comfort knowing I’m not alone in helping a parent navigate the difficult path into old age.