My coffee is Getting Cold...

If I had to write a title for my life, that would be it: My Coffee is Getting Cold.
If I wanted to write it as a short poem, it could start and end:

Take care!
Your coffee could get cold
While life goes on and you get old.

My mother had coffee and cinnamon toast on the table for my 14 year old girlfriends and me right after school. She thought it was high time we learned to drink coffee, boiled and black. The grounds went in when the water came to a boil and allowed on the burner just until the grounds turned over. It was immediately poured through a strainer and into the glass mugs beside the plates of cinnamon toast. We were all good to go another six hours and felt a little like we were getting by with something.

He Who Must Be Obeyed was dressed, packed, his coffee in a thermos, when I woke up on Easter Sunday morning. He drove out in a dark dawn at 5:45 and I stepped into the shower, getting ready for early church. I find myself alone again for the better part of a week. I boiled coffee this morning. It sits beside me now, steaming a little, while I chart out the days ahead of me, six of them at least.

With a spring warmth that will surely bring out the ferns, I will rake the remainder of the pear and grape leaves off of them before they emerge and green. We could use a rain. I will make fiddle head salad again when I can pick enough to make a difference in a salad. Eating them grounds me to my back yard. I feel the same way about the grapes and the pears. It is easy for me to understand the Mother Earth concept.

Today this conflicted mother prays, while she rakes, for a husband dealing with a bi-polar adult daughter, apparently in full blown mania; her out of control life needs a father to pick up the pieces, aright devastated finances, counsel her personal life of self-destruction, and meet with another group of State Social Service people. He will take her unwashed laundry of the past three weeks to the laundromat. His eight hour drive is purposeful, stressful, and hopefully will be consequential. I am in awe of the way he uncomplainingly does what needs to be done, knowing it all happens with predictable regularity.

The closing of the hospitals for the mentally ill has caused untold horror which results in the homeless, the hopeless, the destitute, and the despair of families trying to hold themselves together in spite of impossible odds of finding help. institutionalizing would be a place of safety, warmth, and care, compared to the mean streets of America. Was it the ACLU that closed all these hospitals? If so they should spend a month or two caring for just one of these people.