It is not a true thing that there have been no little landmines since my last post here. The true thing is that life around here is a little different than it used to be, and I find myself only infrequently with time, energy, and inspiration enough to write anything.

The near daily landmine I have is when I receive a call placed from my father's house. Of course, we only started calling it that once Mama died -- it had always been "Granny's house" before -- so this is the picture that still comes up when a call comes from there:

Some days I get teary when I see it; other times I smile remembering the day I shot that picture. The afghan was a gift to my granddaughter when she was born, from a dearest friend. Mama really hammed it up for this picture, which is something she did pretty frequently. She'd insist she didn't want her picture taken, and then she'd pull something like this out of her artillery, and, well, it's a sweet memory.

Yesterday I attended a monthly luncheon for the club to which Mama and I belonged. We had a splendid speaker, and a really lovely lunch, and as I was heading out of the place one of Mama's best friends (with whom I've had numerous conversations since Mama's death) stopped me and said she had something she needed to tell me.

Let me backtrack here for a second: the day before Mama went to the hospital, we knew our "system" would be activated that night to call 9-1-1. Her difficulties happened in the middle of the night but she, not wishing to bother anybody, would wait until the next day to inform us she'd had trouble.  Her cardiologist told her that Friday to call the emergency service when it happened again, because the best chance of getting to the bottom of it would be in the ER as it was happening. None of us had any particular reason to believe that this was anything terribly serious. We just knew Mama had something going on that was causing her discomfort, messing with her sleep, and leaving her flat tired every day.

So - we had a system in place for phone tree, and who'd stay where and who would go, and I suspect we all went to bed that Friday night knowing the phone would ring. It did, and by dawn on Saturday Mama was in ICU.

Once she was there, she asked me to call two of her closest friends to tell them where she was. I didn't think a thing of it -- they were in the best position to inform all the other friends quickly.

I hadn't thought about any of that since then, until Lois pulled me aside yesterday. She said that she'd been trying to figure out when the right time was to tell me what she was fixing to tell me, and that something nudged her that that moment was the right time.

And here's what she told me.

On Friday, the day before she was hospitalized, while we were all fine-tuning our preparations for the call we knew would come, Mama called these friends -- Lois and Hallie. She told them what was going on. And she told them something else.

She told them goodbye.

She told them she knew she would never come home again.

When Lois told me this, I could hardly breathe. I have struggled for more than 24 hours now to figure out what to make of this revelation.

I'm still not entirely sure, but at least one thing it cements in my mind is this: every word my mother spoke, every note she wrote when she could no longer speak, every squeeze of the hand, every raised eyebrow and thumbs up was intentional.

And even more perplexing, I'm trying to figure out why yesterday suddenly seemed like the right time for me to know. 

Written to us on 10/6/11, actually.