low overhead

Spent most of my morning at my mother's house. Had breakfast and helped her in the yard. Picking up sticks, the toys chewed up by the puppy, mowing the yard. Her hibiscus plants are enormous, about three feet tall. She has the most lovely yellow crinkled variety.

I enjoy my mornings over there. I wish I could spend more of my time like that. We talked about my grandparents and my mother told me another story from her childhood. When she was five, my grandfather was stationed in Athens, Greece. They lived on the second floor of a house up the hill from the school my mother attended.

One Saturday afternoon she was standing outside, looking down the hill and saw a plane flying in low. Disturbingly low. She remembers only trying to remember which direction to run to her father's office, or if she should run inside and tell her mother a plane was going to hit the house. The plane crashed into the schoolyard, and for years my mother had nightmares about planes crashing into the house. She has always paused whenever one flys over.

My mother had another nightmare, of waking up in her bedroom and calling out for her mother. No one comes, so she walks out onto the balcony, and there are flashing red and blue lights. Decades later she mentioned the dream in passing to my grandmother, who told her it was all real. One night, the woman who lived on the first floor of the house murdered her family in their sleep.

Strange how we remember these things.

Home doing laundry, eating tortilla chips. Wishing I didn't have to get up in the morning.