My Mother's memories consist mostly of things that happened 40+ years ago. Rarely does she talk about something that happened in the past 20 years. And actually, if she tells any story that doesn't involve her childhood, I tend to listen a little more carefully. She has a few more recent memories that she'll tell quite often, but for the most part they all involve "back home". When she uses the words 'back home', or refers to her home in any way, she is not talking about her home that we moved her out of. She isn't talking about any home she ever shared with my Dad through the almost 50 years they were married. She is referrring to her childhood home. It's not that she doesn't remember Dad, her husband. She does, and will talk about him frequently. She just doesn't seem to remember much about where they lived. She'll see something in my house that came from her house and automatically say, "oh, that was gramma's." And I always let it go.
She'll talk about her hometown like it's another planet. Her grandmother raised her in a small town in Ohio called Utica. These days, when she brings it up, which is daily, she'll say it in such a way that she makes it SOUND like another planet. She'll say it like it's six different words. Ewe Tic Ah, Oh High Oh. I don't know where she picked up that habit, but it's getting a little weird. And everything in Ewe Tic Ah is still the way it was 60 years ago. She's sure of it. (actually, she may be right about that one--it IS a small town). But she really hasn't been there in years. Whenever she sees anything out of her ordinary, she'll comment that they don't have such things where she's from. It could be a city bus, or we could be at the nursery looking at plants. If she sees something that she isn't familiar with, its always the same thing. "We don't have anything like that where I'm from." She get so upset when she reads something in the paper about a rape or murder...and then she's right...they really didn't have anything like that where she's from.
Beam me up, Scotty.
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