"Where your street has no name"

This summer my mother will be moving.  She's lived at her current residence for over fifty years.  She and my dad designed the split-level ranch and went through many joys and traumas on that property.

She lives there alone and will be eighty this year.  While her health has been good, she's not as spry as she once was and moving to a house with less stairs would be a good option.

The reason for her move has nothing to do with her health or mental state. The state wants to build a highway next to her house.  The limited access highway will cut off access to her property. It will be too expensive to build a bridge for her and the other three residents of the area, so the state is buying the whole property. They will likely demolish the house, the barns and other outbuildings as well as eliminate the road that accesses it.

Things change.  And the timing of this with my mother's age and health is probably good.  Yet it is hard to wrap my head around the idea.  The house I grew up in will no longer be there.  We won't even be able to visit the property because the road will be gone.  And when we see it, it will be unrecognizable.  It will exist as it was only in my memory and right now that doesn't seem like enough.

Water, Water, Everywhere

This morning in the shower, I realized that I have been working with water, flowing or not flowing, in so many areas of my life during the last month.

The obvious area is the potty training where water appears and does not appear at surprising interludes, but I have been meaning to mop the kitchen for quite some time and now I am taking care of that little by little.

Another area is our street.  The city is installing new water and sewer mains, so the street has been closed for the last month and our driveway inaccessible by any vehicle without tracks. Positive points: Our relatively - for a small town - busy street has been traffic free The majority of the traffic has been front-end loaders, dump trucks and excavators much to my son's entertainment.  Driveway inaccessible - not so much fun, especially when you need to go anywhere with three carseat age children and you need to carry more than your purse, diaper bag and the baby down the block to the street where you must park.  The other frustration of the construction was the unspecified water outages.  No warning, just no water.  It'd only be out for an hour or two, but I usually discovered it after cleaning up after the dogs in the backyard and turning on the tap to wash my hands.

And then as art must mirror life... in the novel I am working on the main character is having plumbing problems of structure altering proportions.  My husband in now fielding questions about where a pipe could break to cause disastrous flooding and how long it would take for ankle-deep water to pool on the floor and would the water seep through the floorboards to the rooms below and... I hope he appreciates how much I rely on his intelligence.

Of course, I discovered all these water connections while I was in the shower where the water was flowing at the opportune moment.