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brutal march cold
Monday, March 15 2021
It was brutally cold today, in the way that is normal only for the coldest couple weeks of the year (the last two weeks of January). Nevertheless, I didn't start the woodstove until about 5:00pm today because Gretchen was at work and there was enough sun to keep the living room from getting too cold. But there were strong gusts of wind pushing open the pet door aand making conditions colder than I normally allow things to get indoors. It took a couple hours for the stove to make conditions in the living room bearable.
My brother Don called me today while being driven by our mother Hoagie to the grocery store to get food, a chore Hoagie lately has had trouble getting organized enough to do. Evidently this time she managed to find her credit card and car keys, but that's not always the case. She even shouted hello at me from the driver's seat, suggesting a modest remaining ability to multitask. All is not well at Mueller's Mountain, however. Later Don called to tell me about another emergency. Apparently Hoagie's fanfare a couple months ago of going off to pay her real estate taxes hadn't actually been completed, and she recently became aware of an $800 debt to the Commonwealth of Virginia and was now considering selling off land to raise the money to pay what she owed. "Wait, she doesn't have $800?" I asked. Then Don corrected the figure, saying it was $8000. She's apparently so disorganized that she doesn't know where such money might be found in the various accounts she doesn't want anyone to know about. Unfortunately, there wasn't much I could do to help, since Hoagie doesn't want to be helped. Indeed, when she caught Don talking to me about it, she got mad at him. She values her privacy so much that she'd rather the airplane of her life crash into a mountain than for her only competent son to find out what a wreck she's allowed it to become.
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