THE MARGUERITE CHRONICLES: SEPTEMBER 16, 2016, PART 4:
3:00 AM. George elbowed me awake to say, “Your mother’s in OUR bathroom flipping the lights on and off.”

Yep. She was. She had to walk past her bathroom into our room to get there, and she’s never done that before. I guided her back to bed, but she was in the throes of a full-blown Looney Toons episode, talking nonstop and intermittently making sense, and if her brain thought it, she said it.

Up again at 6, talking to the Choctaws. At 8, she snuck downstairs, this woman who hasn’t taken her own pills for 5 years, and bragged to our houseguest that she had taken her morning medicine.

Only it was her nighttime medicine.

Which meant she was going to be groggy on top on wacko. And then, Sister Margie calls from the beach condo to say there’s standing water on the floor of a bedroom and the sheetrock is wet, and I started calling Benchmark mulltiple times to get somebody over there…and then we were due at UHaul to pick up a truck for getting some furniture from my brother-in-law in Fredericksburg and there is not one spare inch in this house for another stick of furniture even if it is a zillion-dollar fine reproduction mega-desk, and I had to talk Mama down the stairs and out to the car one leg at a time because her brain was on the night shift.

There was nothing to do but strap her in a seat belt, pick up some grandsons and haul ’em all up I-95. And now we have a UHaul truck out front and no place to put the stuff that’s in it even though we do have a double garage and an 8-stall barn, and nobody to help unload it even if we did have room, and our front yard already looks like West Virginia but it has been too hot this summer for me to clean out the garage. So it’s not just Mama who’s Looney Toons.

The apple didn’t fall far, and it whacked me on the head on the way down.