Phone calls

We used to talk to Nana every week or two. She was my mom and while not much earth-shattering happened between calls, it was nice to check in and chat. So it was a little strange that she hadn't called for a while. And neither had I - we were busy and time just slid by.

We had a few calls but everything was as always, other than the big space between them.

In June she did call and mentioned that my father had had another treatment. They had drained excess fluid from his belly again. Not much was going on, a friend had died, my sister was expecting, just family chatter.

They lived about 180 miles away in Connecticut. It was awkward for them to visit because my father didn't like the outdoors very much, and he also smoked a great deal. They had come up in the late fall soon after we moved in, and he hadn't liked smoking out on the porch. 

And we really couldn't stand having smoke in the house, not just for the minutes it took to inhale a cigarette but for the months after when the smell lingered on and on. 

That combined with his dislike of leaving home and also of driving any distance meant that we didn't see either of them very often. 

Before the farm we had gone to Connecticut to see them a couple of times a year, and usually continued on to New Jersey to see the other grandparents. But the farm made leaving impossible.

So we hadn't seen them, but we'd talked on the phone. And now we were not doing that as much, but our chats were full of homey news and I always enjoyed them, and Nana did too. I knew we'd get back in the swing of it when we had the farm routine under our belts.