A time of transition

The day after school ends, I head for North Carolina to see my mother.  After another year of teaching, I’m desperate for a vacation, and she needs my company.  It promises not to be exciting.  My mother, who is 85, fractured her hip in April. The facility where she lives in her own apartment has a section for rehab, so I’ll be spending a lot of time visiting her in her room there.   

My mother lives in what I call an “assisted-living palace.” You pay the price of a house to move in and the monthly maintenance is astronomical, but they take care of you until you die. When you can’t take care of yourself, they move you downstairs to The Grove. That’s where my mother is now, albeit temporarily. I don’t know why they call it The Grove; the people who live there look nothing like trees. 

I love to take walks in my mother’s neighborhood — a former dairy farm — because there are still pastures with belted cows (also called Oreo cows). You see a lot of these animals where my mother lives: black except for a white stripe around their middles. This is as unlike New York as any place a Bronx girl can be, a welcome contrast to scenes of people glued to cellphones packing subways stalled by construction. I watch the cows do nothing but stand moronically (although one calf is sucking hungrily at her mother’s teat) and I think, “I wish I were as unbusy.” Cows have big heads and big bodies, but they seem not to have a thought in their heads. Even my nephew’s dog shows some signs of intelligence.  Cows make me afraid to drink milk; maybe stupidity is contagious.

An extended family of belted goats lives behind an electric fence a five-minute walk from her building. The belted goat family (the goats are actually called “Tennessee fainting goats”) always includes one or two pregnant females. Apparently goats reproduce like rabbits; they’re a sexy bunch. Kids as young as 7 days mount other kids.  I take a walk once a day in this bucolic setting. Cars pass all the time, but drivers do something you’d never see in New York: they smile and give a wide wave!