PHOTOBOMB: Mother’s Day 2022

“The second of three weekends in one month that I will be driving twelve hours to Chicago.”

I mean, the sub-title should explain exactly why I’m opting for a shorter Instagram post-styled “photobomb” post instead of a longer, more thoughtful piece as I’ve done previously. I drove a lot this weekend and I’m starting a new job this week (well, it’s the second week of a new job, but you get the idea), so I don’t really have the time to write something in-depth before my regular Tuesday deadline. Plus, if I’m being honest, as I get older I am starting to feel that large, public declarations of love or appreciation are kind of tacky (like, say, a detailed and personal mother’s day post), especially if they’re on this blog. I think that those things should be kept private, or at least that it’s bad form to trumpet it to everyone else like some sort of weird virtue signaling, so, going forward, if I write something like that, it will be more personally directed. Now, I do feel that “in memorial” pieces, like I’ve done for my grandfather, are a bit different, so I’ll likely do those in the future. Fingers crossed I won’t have to do that again anytime soon, though.

But, be that as it may, I still find myself running short on time and realizing that I’m running into a bit of a wall with the next research-heavy post I want to do. It’s gonna be a thing eventually, but it deserves a bit more care than just shoving a few things together over a couple of hours on a rushed Sunday night, so I’m saving some space for that. Until then, I think that sharing with you all what I did this Mother’s Day weekend is perfectly acceptable. Especially because, hey, how is this different from facebook or Instagram, anyway? Maybe it’s closer to Vsco because there is no “like” button here.

Either way, this weekend was a pretty solid weekend! I drove down from Minneapolis Friday afternoon, got into the Chicago suburbs at almost 11pm, and spent the next day with my mom. We went hiking with family at Franklin Creek State Natural Area, which I remember as being an overgrown mess of problem species like buckthorn and honeysuckle situated out in the middle of the corn in western Illinois. Either I must have misremembered, the place has been cleaned up significantly since then, or I was so entranced by the abundance of wild sping flowers that I didn’t mind the otherwise overwhelming nature of the problem species, because I barely thought about that at all this time around. Could have been that I was too busy talking to my aunts or listening to my mom, or too busy trying to squeeze the water out of my boots after wading through a stream and taking a step into water that was much deeper than I had anticipated. But the flowers were wonderful!

Between the trillium, jack-in-the-pulpit, dutchman’s britches, shooting stars, and whatever the hell else we saw on that short hike through the corn/woods, I was sufficiently impressed to give the rest of the forest a pass, I guess. So it was a pretty good hike overall, and since I consider the coming of spring with the blooming of woodland wildflowers, I guess spring finally is here! At least in Illinois. I have yet to see similar flowers in Minnesota, though I suppose I don’t actually know what the differences are in flowers between the states. Perhaps Minnesota doesn’t have spring flowers like Illinois does? It would feel weird to have gone a season without such flowers, but at least I saw them for now.

By the way, I now have a weird aversion to including photos with people’s faces in them, just because of privacy reasons and what not, so I hope that no one’s offended by an overall lack of photos of, well, my actual mother. The only person who’s got the right to really be offended by that is my mom, so I hope that’s alright. Sorry, mom! We didn’t actually really get any good pictures together, except for maybe a few hiking but I don’t have those so this is what you’re getting instead. Happy Mother’s Day!

Following the hike, we went to my grandfather and his girlfriend’s house in a nearby town and helped them build a pond. Well, really, the pond was already built, so we were more installing a bunch of bricks and plants and a little fountain so that, eventually, there can be little fish living in this pond. Inevitably, I am sure, these fish will be eaten by whatever raccoon lumbers around in their backyard, but it’ll be nice in the meantime! We followed that up with a trip to the local diner in town, and a jog over the ice cream counter nearby. We ended with playing to and talking with their large macaw, who was less than delighted to find his home invaded by a handful of faces that, even as a bird, he can barely recognize. He displayed this rancor by throwing around metal measuring cups and a plastic ball.

In keeping in line with the theme of flowers, my mom and I then drove to a gardening center back near her house and bought a whole bunch of vegetables, which we took home and planted in a garden out back. We even mixed up a whole bunch of compost and worked it into the soil in the garden for what should, hopefully, be a bumper year of beans and tomatoes and perhaps a pumpkin. Funnily enough, I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned this before on here, but it is the same garden that I began working on myself back in 2020 when I suddenly found myself leaving college to escape the first clutches of the pandemic. Back then, I felt lost and confused and cheated and a bit like the world was ending, so maybe starting a garden gave me some semblance of control. Now, I still feel lost and confused and cheated and a bit like the world is ending but for entirely different reasons, and the pandemic continues to claim lives and decimate communities, but we’ve got vaccines and tests and slightly less ineffective government control measures to protect us, so we can go back to things in person again, I guess? I don’t know. The garden has nothing to do with this, really, but it’s something that, for the most part, hasn’t changed so much. But I did stick my fingers in the dirt so that’s very nice!

To round out the day we watched On Golden Pond, a movie which depicts family life, loss, and redemption with an older couple, the man coming to terms with his mortality and his own regrets and making connections with other people. That being said it’s a bit less of The Father and a bit more of Grumpy Old Men, but I did enjoy it! It was actually filmed on Squam Lake in New Hampshire, a place that I have been going to for basically my entire life because Jane, my grandfather’s girlfriend, owns a cabin up in that same neck of the woods. But not only is the movie’s locale super familiar, but the dynamic between Hepburn and Fonda in the movie is eerily reminiscent of my own grandfather and his girlfriend, so watching that movie was, to some degree, almost like watching a home family video. It was strange, to say the least. But now I understand why my mom likes it so much, and I will (not) stop making fun of her about it.

That night I also went to a party at a friend’s house, and spent time playing poker and drinking with them, which was a lot of fun too! Poker seems to have become something of a past-time with my friend group of folks I know from home, so we played a few games of that, drank crazy Korean alcohols, and also played Egyptian rat slap, which has nothing to do with slapping rats, unfortunately, and has much more to do with slapping a pile of cards before anybody else can. That, too, has been gaining popularity at get-togethers now.

To round out the weekend, though, my mom and I did some more gardening on Sunday. She had gotten a whole bunch of annual flowers to plant along the front of the house and the road to our house, so she put them in the ground while I split some wood, too. I got to say, I must have written about splitting wood when I got back from Philmont, because I split a lot of wood at Philmont. I don’t know why I enjoy it so much, but there’s something alluring about figuring out the best way to place a log and then taking one solid smack to it so that it just explodes into two clean pieces. And logs that take more than one hit to cut are almost like puzzles, turning them over and finding the right grooves and natural splits to aim for to get it to break more easily. I love it. So I took some time and chewer through a few logs before getting on the road to drive back to Minneapolis. Yeah, I was there for only about 36 hours, but it was a very full 36 hours.

Oh, we also got Chinese food for lunch on Mother’s Day proper, which is one more year in our family’s strange tradition of getting Chinese for Mother’s Day. I don’t think it was even intentional this time around, but my family, specifically my dad’s side of the family, has been getting Chinese on Mother’s Day on and off for the last decade or so, I think. Which I think started because my great grandmother really liked Chinese food, and her being the oldest mother in the family, the celebration defaulted to what she wanted. Except for the year we climbed around on military tanks for Mother’s Day. I don’t think that was her idea.

But, anyway, that’s how I spent my weekend, and these have been some of the photos I took! It was a jam-packed couple of days, and I drove a lot, but it was worth it. I love you, mom. Thanks for always being there for me.

And happy Mother’s Day to everyone else, too. Mostly the mothers out there, but also everyone else, even if you aren’t a mother, or aren’t close with yours. Happy Day to you anyway.