And the Lord Saith Let There Be Dishwashers!

 

Yes, yes, I have been here a lot the last two weeks. We've been in Santa Cruz moving some of our investment funds to a credit union here. Gonna give you a big moving to Costa Rica secret -- the banks and credit unions here offer the best certificate of deposit rates, unlike the USA. We live off the interest of our various investments in Costa Rica. If you do that not only will you likely beat the volatile stock market along with the bonds and CD rates, you'll gain investor status here. It makes residency much easier. Costa Rica just wants to make sure you can support yourself if you move here.

Pretty excited tonight! My new dishwasher has been installed and made pretty short work of the dishes. I have been living in this house nearly eight years with me being the solemente dishwasher. I am so thrilled! Ordered the new washer and dryer and they're supposed to be in at the store in a week, and installed the Tuesday afterward. Repairman here tomorrow to work on putting a cover over my secret reading nook deck and install a better cat door. Those rascally raccoons have figured out how to open the heavy glass doors to my surprise. One night doing it while we were in the living room only ten feet away. 

On the other side the general confloption continues with my mother. A few more scary falls. Today is her birthday, but it brought on a pretty terrible conversation with my Chicken Little aunt. CL auntie wanted to know what my mother's favorite cake was and I had to admit I just did not know. Since I married and moved away from the area much of her day to day tastes are a mystery to me. I told my aunt I was sending flowers, like I do every Christmas, birthday and Mother's Day and she informed me that my mother hated flowers. You could have knocked me over with a feather I was so surprised! I've given her flowers for years, expensive arrangements, and it turns out that the way to her heart is with a box of butter cookies! She's always gushed over the flower arrangements, calling me immediately to profoundly thank me for them. So I'm having a hard time buying what my aunt is saying. I sent butter cookies with as good of graces I could. It was much cheaper at least. 

One of the big things I've had to grapple with in this season is knowing that I'll never be able to ask my mother for the truth over so many things. Being raised as I was there were always undercurrents of things in our house. One of the biggest traumatic secrets and lies sort of thing that happened during my childhood was what happened when my parents divorced after a long acrimonious marriage. My father forced my mother to sell our house. It was in the lone country club neighborhood in our small southern town. We moved there when I was six after a life spent bouncing around from New Orleans to Mobile. I was twelve when the house was sold. One of the things I was most worried about was what would happen to my antique piano. I'd played and taken lessons for years and I was worried that the piano wouldn't make it to our new apartment. My mother promised me she'd already arranged with the movers to have the piano move with us. Right up until about a week before the move when my father and his parents showed up with a piano mover to take my piano to a cousin's house. My father insisted that my mother demanded they come get it because it had been in my father's family for many years. My mother said he was lying, she'd already made arrangements with the movers.

One of them was clearly lying to me, and this screwed me up so badly. Afterward I trusted neither of them. Now as time has gone on I'd come to believe my father, but still my mother refuses to admit she lied about it. Why did I conclude that? My father's story was consistent through the years, and my mother's was not. I'd heard about three differing versions of what happened from her. I came to this in my forties after talking to both. Dad went and fetched my piano from the cousin and brought it up to me in Virginia. 

Don't lie to your kids. They are resilient and they need to know the truth of things. I don't think my mother wanted to outlay the money to move the piano since it wasn't important to her. These are the kinds of things that cause kids to distrust their parents.

Interesting enough when we moved to Costa Rica I faced the dilemma of the piano. None of my kids wanted it, even if my son absconded with my acoustic guitar and keyboards. Antique pianos are a hard sell. It was a mahogany upright grand, such a massive thing we had to remove the back doors of the house to get it in and to get it out again. I ended up gifting it to a nice young woman that told me she wanted it because her family gave her piano away around the same age. It felt like a circle completed that it went to someone with such a similar tale. I am glad. I do miss it, but it would be all wrong here.