I continue to explore and observe. I am now kicking my literary tendencies to the curb. Three days of Lamictal have contained my foolish heart, and I am now safely contained in the little cradle between hinged and unhinged, the question mark between real and unreal. I am straightening up my kitchen cabinets and restoring fung shui to my living room. I am sick of talking,and waiting in the blog-room for folks to cross my threshold with tears in their eyes. My mother, from deep in the ectoplasm, would say, "It's about time." She used to tell people this story about me. "When she was a baby, we couldn't wait for her to start talking. Now she won't shut up!" Now that I have this blog, I know what she would say.

She would say Shut Up. Now that she has been dead for a few years, I am finally getting to know her. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, depends on how you feel about silence. My mother invented silence, a special kind of silence that dwelt in the interstices of bird song and the fade of cars driving by her green kitchen.

She sat at her kitchen table for six years, in a velvet armchair given to her by a Buddhist priest. His name was Herbert. The table was rectangular, a wooden table with a drawer along the long side. She sat in front of the drawer. Sometimes she put things in the drawer, but only when no one was around. The leaves of the table looked like someone had chewed on them. One table leg was all clawed up from generations of cats, for some reason, all preferring the same leg.

My mother kept treasured items on the table in front of her. First, a glass vase with five stems of purple and white dendrobium orchids. Then a couple of bobble-head smiling dogs. Sometimes she bopped their heads with her index finger, and they would smile and nod. She smiled and said, "They always agree with me." Next to the bobble-heads was a picture of her cat, Sheba, who was not a gray cat. She was a Russian Blue. Sheba and my mother had perfect communication. When my mother lay down in the dining room on her little cot, Sheba would curl up around my mother's head, the tip of her tail flicking against my mother's nose.

When my mother was not sleeping on her little cot, she was seated in the velvet armchair at her kitchen table, looking out over the table and out the window toward the bird feeder. This was the scope of her world, her kingdom, her realm; and she was its Madeline Allbright, its monarch, its Queen.

One year at Christmas the Presbyterian minister, her husband and their son, and one old man from the congregation came into the kitchen and sang Christmas carols on the far side of her table. They had brought cookies on a paper plate. She ate the cookies while they sang. She knew the minister meant well but she found the visit annoying. My mother had mood swings, which diminished as she aged. By the time she was in her late 80s, all she had left was annoyance and a sharp tongue. Her sarcasm was honed to such a fine edge that it was virtually undetectable by those toward whom it was addressed. She no longer had to issue commands. All she had to do was make a statement such as, "my ice cubes have melted," or "the cat wants to go out," and her unspoken request would be fulfilled instantly.

As long as the ice cubes were crisp and the cat was out (or in), as long as the window as open (or shut,) my mother was happy; or, as she would say, "content." At such times she would click on the TV; and Law and Order would resume, episode after episode heralded by the bass guitar phrase I can now not remember.