My stepmother is really sick. The doctors aren’t sure why this happened, but somehow she contracted a virus a few years ago that over time destroyed some of her lung tissue. Lung cells do not regenerate. So she is on oxygen twenty-four hours a day, and has to do hour-long breathing treatments every few days, and the estimate for her survival is fuzzy but generally accepted at two to five years after being diagnosed with her specific lung ailment.

She is, in a lot of ways, more of a mother to me than my real mother, and if she is not around if/when I get married or have kids, I know that I will always feel like those events were somehow lacking. So when I go to Georgia it’s to visit her as much as my dad, and being nearer to her was a definite factor in my decision to move to Savannah this year.

I don’t really talk to a lot of people about her being sick. Certainly not to my mom or her side of the family; they are sympathetic but they really don’t get why she and I are so close. And not to my dad, because he and I are both those types of people who keep things really close to them, and if we ever were to really sit down and let it out, how bad we feell about it all, the world would probably spontaneously combust. I do sometimes talk to her about it though; she likes or needs to talk about it and she told me that I’m the only one who doesn’t try to avoid the subject with her. So, sometimes she tells me how sad and scared it makes her to know that she’s going to miss certain milestones in her kids’ and grandkids’ lives, and I don’t really know what to say back, or maybe I do, sort of, but I don’t want to feel like I’m hijacking the discussion or anything, so I just let her talk, and it seems to help us both a little.

So, this is all a long-winded way of saying that I spend a lot of time with her whenever I visit Albany. On this past trip, however, I was with her even more than usual, because my dad and I got into a big fight halfway through the week and then avoided each other until the night before I left, when he came to talk to me and we had a big teary discussion, and things are fine now. I really don’t feel like talking about our fight. I think we fixed everything so I’d rather not revisit how I felt those three days when I thought we’d never be freinds again.

Shit, that was all it took, now I’m crying on my keyboard.

So, for the secong half of the week I was there, he went back to work every day, and I stuck with my stepmom. She retired last year, a few years early because of her disability, and now she spends her good days gardening or driving her grandkids around after school, or meeting friends for lunch, or going shopping or doing errands or whatever. Her bad days she spends in bed.

I did most of the driving on the days when we left the house. We went to the monagram shop once. Since she has to carry around a portable oxygen tank when she leaves the house (where a huge oxygen machine whirrs away in the living room), she has an assortment of tote bags (to match her outfits, yes) and each one is monagrammed. I think monagramming is very big in the south. She also gave my (step)niece, who is ten and horse-crazy, some pillows covered in horse fabric and monagrammed with her name, for Christmas.

Other than the monagram shop, we visited her daughter at her job at the bank, and went to lunch with her, and went to the mall once or twice, and some fabric shops and a nursery (plants, not babies) and her hairdresser and her old job, so she could drop in and say hi. She used to be the director for a battered womens’ and childrens’ shelter, and it was because of this that I came to have my photo taken with Gloria Steinem, and listen to her speak, at age fourteen.

I guess it is true what they say, that you can’t go home again. Driving around, all I could think about was all the shops and landmarks I remember from my childhood that are no longer there; they have been replaced by other shops, in some cases, or by big chain restaurants, in more cases. The lumber shop, with the animated electric sign of the man hammering a plank of wood, was still there. As was the Coca-cola bottling plant, the otherlumber shop with the huge man-in-overalls statue outside, and the local theatre (plays, not movies, although there is one of those too). But the shop where my mom got me those barrettes I loved, with the apple cores hand-painted onto them, and my first diary, was gone. As was the old train station-turned-city museum, the place where I used to take ballet lessons, and the Italian restaurant where the famous I-ate-a-jalopeno-pepper incident took place.

The way my dad tells it, he and my mom and I were eating there once when I was maybe four, and I always loved olives so he gave me what he thought was a big green olive from his salad, and I took a big bite and started wailing and tearing up, and they handed me my glass of chocolate milk to drink, and I took a big gulp and then spat it out and wailed some more because it was soured. And they both had glasses of beer in front of them, so nothing for me to drink, and there was a big kerfuffle while they hustled to get the waiter to bring a glass of water, and apparently I was pretty mad at my dad for giving me that pepper for a while. When he tells the story now, he laughs so hard he can’t go on, and I just sort of roll my eyes, all “oh jeez, here we go again with that pepper story,” because believe me, he will tell that story to anybody who will listen.

And that field where we used to watch Fourth of July fireworks is still a field, thank god (if it had been in a town around here it would be a subdivision by now for sure), but now they set off fireworks near the huge convention center down by the river that separates Albany from East Albany.

I wonder how the people who have lived there continuously all these years feel about the town changing so much, since it’s happened right under their feet, but for me, coming back once a year since I was eight, it’s sad. I don’t know what I expected really. For time to just stop in the year when I moved away, so that I could always have my childhood frozen in time? Not really. I guess I just wish I had known then, when I was seven and we moved to Maryland, that I should have looked around really closely and memorized everything and everyone, and that nowhere I would ever live again would be quite the same as that town, and that I should have appreciated how big a deal that would be to me now, now that I have lived in a bunch of places.

Because it’s true, nowhere else is quite the same as that town.