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Tag Archives: Wyoming PA

The interesting stuff…

19 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by wyndes in Mom, Personal, Travel

≈ 7 Comments

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Frances Slocum State Park, Pennsylvania, Wyoming PA

I walked Zelda this morning into a scene of such stunning beauty that I was glad I’d left my cell phone back in Serenity. If I’d had it with me, I would have tried to capture the moment and I would have failed, because I don’t know how to take good photos, and it would have been just another generic pretty scenery picture. But the full moon was still up, in a sky that had wisps of sunrise clouds, a very subtle pink and twilight purple, in an otherwise overcast white. Mist was rising off water that looked a deep dark rippling green and in the distance, the hills… rolled. An artist could have drawn the classic three intersecting lines that anyone would recognize as hills in the distance and it would have been those exact three hills. It wasn’t bright, it wasn’t showy, but it was so beautiful I had to hold my breath, as if breathing would shatter it.

I’m in Frances Slocum State Park, in Pennsylvania. I came here because it was the closest camping spot to a cemetery I wanted to visit. Yeah, with the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore on my list of places to see, as well as the entire country of possibilities, my first destination was a graveyard. Ha.

But I’ve had my mom’s ashes sitting on my closet shelf for about four years now. She died five years ago and at the time I thought we’d get together and do some family thing with her ashes after a suitable time had passed. I don’t know what exactly — take them out to sea, maybe? On a cruise? She would have loved that, if the whole family had gotten together and gone on a cruise in celebration of her. But instead my dad remarried. There’s an interesting awkwardness to not being finished with your first wife’s business when you already have a second wife, or at least so it seemed to me, and my mom’s ashes became part of that.

Long story short, eventually they wound up with me, and I’ve let them sit, not knowing what to do with them. Her last remains. Except that they are so not her last remains. I am what remains of her. R is what remains of her. The scrapbooks she created, those are her remains. My sister, my brother, their kids, our memories… so much remains of her. And these ashes, they’re not important, not really. But I did want to dispose of them respectfully. Even, I guess, lovingly. If there is any possibility that my mom’s spirit is connected in any way to the pile of grey dust that was her body, I wanted her to be happy with what happened to that dust.

That brings me to the cemetery I was looking for. My great-grandmother is buried there, and I thought it would be nice to scatter my mom’s ashes there. She loved her grandmother and treasured her memories of visiting her grandmother’s farm when she was little. I wish I had any idea where the farm was because that would have been perfect (barring the extreme discomfort of asking someone if they’d mind if you scattered ashes on their property and/or the great likelihood that it’s some kind of housing development now…) but the cemetery was the best I could do.

It was lovely. Beautiful, green, serene. Gorgeous and old. Also surreal. I wandered through the gravestones looking for the right one — Myrtle Smith, with Paul Smith next to her — and instead finding, with vague shocks of recognition, everyone else. My grandfather’s parents. My grandfather’s sister. My other great-grandparents. My great-great grandparents. Plenty of strangers’ names, of course, but down every line, another Smith, Rozelle, Lewis, Labar, and Hahn. It was eerie and charming and sort of heart-wrenching. I looked at what I was pretty sure was my great-grandparents’ gravestone — Grover Cleveland and Jessie Labar — and knew almost nothing about them. I recognized their names but that was it.

In the end, I did find the right grave and sprinkled a handful of my mom’s ashes there. I didn’t anticipate how emotional I would feel about it, how much it would bring my grief back to me and how sharp that pain would be. The dead always outnumber the living in a cemetery, but being alone there, surrounded by my forgotten relatives, was… hard.

Afterwards, I drove into the town, West Pittston, looking for the houses where my mom had grown up. I had an idea of discreetly sprinkling more of her ashes, I think — but the streets were narrow and the idea of parking was terrifying and navigating was a challenge — Z is just not good at reading maps for me and my GPS is always a little late — so I came back to the campground and settled in.

Fortunately, the park is beautiful. The campsites are shaded by trees, with screens of trees separating one site from the next. It’s been rainy and muddy, but very peaceful. (With the minor exception of my poor neighbors not having much success handling their whiny kids. The dad’s exasperated, “What am I supposed to DO with her?” had me wincing in sympathy.)

I suspect the reason people think of the ocean when it comes to ashes is that there’s actually quite a bit of them — a handful can be scattered elegantly but dumping out the whole bag just seemed very not cool. Both not respectful and also leaving a mess for the person next mowing the lawn to be disturbed by. Maybe if you can hurl them off a mountaintop, the wind would carry them away, but my image of gently scattering dust does not match the reality of a heavy duty plastic bag with a mound of ashes in it.

Still, I’ve taken many long walks here, including one where I went fairly far off a trail into the woods and found a nice young tree that looked like it might benefit from some nutrients at its roots. I don’t know how my mom would feel about that — she wasn’t much of a nature person. She preferred her camping to include comfortable beds and flush toilets.

But I kept some of the ashes. I’m not sure why. I thought I was ready to let go, but maybe not. It’s definitely one of those times when logic is warring with intuition, though. Logic is saying “Storage! Trees, nutrients!” but my intuition is telling me that there’s something else I need to be doing. For most of my life — all of my life — logic would have won, but not today. Maybe I’ll visit my grandparents’ graves while I’m at this. Or maybe I’ll bring the ashes to the Grand Canyon with me. I wonder how many people do that? I bet lots. It seems like that kind of place. Or maybe I need to let my siblings have their own experiences with saying goodbye in that way. I’m really not sure, but what’s left of her ashes comes with me.

Anyway, at the moment, I’m sitting in a grocery store parking lot, wishing I still had a grill. Wondering if I should buy firewood. Trying to think of some food plan for the next few days and mostly eating spice drops, currently my worst food vice. Today and tomorrow I’m floating around PA and on Monday, I’m headed into NJ for the day. Next week, NY, and the week after that, Vermont.

Practical angst

18 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by wyndes in Personal, Pets, Randomness, RV, Serenity, Travel

≈ 6 Comments

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Frances Slocum State Park, Pennsylvania, West Pittston PA, Wyoming PA

I bought my coconut milk in haste at the store the other day and it is vanilla-flavored coconut milk, instead of normal coconut milk. It is, to put it in a nutshell, disgusting. It is making me sad when I drink my coffee and I refuse to contemplate what it might be like on cereal. I ought to throw it away, find myself a new grocery store, and buy myself some new coconut milk, but the last “coconut milk” I bought was half almond milk, half coconut, and it was also disgusting. I did throw it away. Throwing away two almost full half gallons of milk-like substance feels so wasteful.

Plus, that time, the store didn’t have any regular coconut milk. I’m currently in a place that could be safely described as middle-of-nowhere, and I’m wary of heading out on a drive to a grocery store that might be half an hour away only to discover when I get there that it doesn’t have coconut milk. The obvious solutions occur to me — GPS nearby grocery stores, find their numbers, call them up and ask! — but I currently have no internet, so even that solution means packing up for a drive to find myself some connectivity.

Obviously, by the time you’re reading this, I will have done so, because ha-ha, posting to my blog also requires internet, but at the moment I’m feeling very disinclined to get on the road. It rained last night, gloriously heavy, so that the pounding of drops on the roof of Serenity was like living inside a maraca. And I totally have to google that word, because I’m not sure whether I’ve got the name right, but again… no internet.

So yeah, living inside a maraca, or if that’s not the right word, one of those instruments you play with as a kid, a gourd filled with seeds that you shake like a baby’s rattle. I wasn’t being shaken, but the sound was that fast, heavy rattle. It was lovely. But I had decided when last I looked at the sky that the overcast white wasn’t gray enough to bring real rain, so I left my chair and my towel and my purple-striped Mexican blanket outside.

They are well beyond damp.

I don’t want them inside Serenity.

Honestly, I don’t even want to touch the blanket. I put it down for the dogs because the ground here is hard gravel and dirt, with some puddles of mud, and I didn’t want them — Zelda especially — to choose the mud puddles as the comfiest place to get cozy. Zelda would. Bartleby also likes to roll in the dirt, but not with the same abandon. He’s not a huge fan of baths and he’s much more sensitive about the possibility of scolding. Z likes baths and she’s seldom been scolded so she luxuriates in the dirt, then comes in and goes straight to the tub. With no tub, I don’t know what she’d do, but tracking mud all over my bed has never bothered her, so I’m pretty sure it would involve me needing to do laundry. I guess I’m going to have to do that anyway, since the blanket might never be clean again. But at least after it dries I ought to be able to shake off some of the dirt and fold it up, so it’s out of the way until I manage to find a washer. My sheets, on the other hand… well, sheets are turning out to be a saga of their own.

Dirt in general is turning out to be an interesting aspect of living in a camper. I’m not a dirt-phobe. Good thing, because campgrounds are dirty and dogs track in dirt and living partially outside and otherwise in a very small space means that there is dirt. I was showering yesterday in my cute little bathroom and the floor was muddy. Not just from my dirty feet, but because I have to stash outside stuff on that floor when I’m on the move. The power cords and water hose lie on the ground outside while I’m parked and when I’m putting them away for a drive (“away” being defined as “on the bathroom floor”), I’m not worrying about the fact that they’ve picked up dirt and bits of leaf debris and grass. Generally speaking when I go camping and things get dirty, I think, well, I’ll get it clean when I get home. Except this is home.

I thought my solution would be to wipe them dry with a towel as I rolled them up to stow them away but at the end of that process, I have a dirty towel. And towels — well, towels are causing me almost as much angst as sheets.

Yesterday the radio hosts on a show I was listening to were debating how many times one should use a towel before washing it. There was an actual, honest-to-goodness argument for once. Dry yourself with a towel one time and then wash it. Um, no. I brought five standard towels with me and I’ve jettisoned two of them to take back the storage space they were using. I brought four or five dish towels with me, and that turns out to be not nearly enough. Drying dishes, wiping spills, cleaning hands after cooking, drying hands, wiping off dogs’ feet and bellies after coming in from a walk… at that point, the towel goes in the laundry bag and before I know it, I’m out of dish towels, and nowhere close to needing to do laundry for anything else.

Except maybe sheets. My sheets are causing me some serious angst, but I need to eat breakfast and get moving — and I can’t believe I haven’t written about the more interesting stuff that’s going on! — so more on sheets and sleeping later. And also the interesting stuff.

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Just catching the sunrise
A little patch of flowers in the wasteland.
Spring is on its way. Yay!
The second rainbow on the right is a little hard to see in the photo so look close.
Pre-Epcot breakfast, made by Frisbee. Total SuperHost. All the stars!

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