Sunday, August 02, 2009



Yesterday Saturday my daughter Ale and her nieces Rebecca and Lauren went to Baja California for two weeks. Rosemary was supposed to go but she had an unscheduled and violent appointment with an SUV at a city corner on Friday noon. She was an innocent pedestrian at the wrong place.

A shattered left ankle must be an example of good luck within all the bad luck that has prevented Rosemary of having our two granddaughters almost all for herself for 14 days.

The operation (this morning) was successful and her doctor predicts that she might be walking (in an orthopedic boot) in about four weeks.

While I always think that Rosemary is most serious she has shown some humour. It seems that she chatted with her ambulance attendant on the short trip to VGH. She asked him, “You did put on the siren for me, didn’t you?” At emergency she was depressed to find out that her clothes had been all cut out. It took me a couple of days to retrieve her sandals, “They were $200 sandals you know?”

As soon as Rosemary found out about the fire in Lillooet she forgot about her ankle and her pain. “There is that Ramirez guitar we bought for Ale in Madrid. It’s going to burn.” Meanwhile my positively philosophical daughter Ale told me on Skype from San Jose del Cabo, “My cats are in Cache Creek and I am here, what could be safer? Besides the Ramirez guitar is in my old room in your house in the closet.”

So now Rosemary is concerned she will not be around to nag our little girls to only speak in Spanish. She is worried about being able to walk for the wedding of her nephew in Brockville at the end of August. And she is of course happily nagging me to water the garden in the allowed hours of 7 to 10 on Sunday nights which is precisely what I am doing right now.

Rosemary is sad that I am not going to have the vacation without her during the next two weeks. I could not manage to explain that while I am sorry she is not having fun in the 42 degree weather of Baja I am very happy to have her here all to myself. Or at least by tomorrow afternoon when she will probably checking out of the hospital.

I returned from the hospital and went into the refrigerator and found a large plum that Rosemary bought for me. I have written many times here about that wonderful poem by William Carlos Williams.

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

I ate that single plum and I reminded myself that Rebecca knows that poem by heart. For two weeks I will have my Rosemary and then, when the girls return, we might just celebrate that we are all alive and that we can enjoy some cold plums from the icebox.