SAVANNAH, GA. -- There is a moment just before consciousness when you feel yourself rising out of a dreamless sleep into the fresh incomprehensiveness of a new day. It takes a moment for the parts to re-assemble, to recognize yourself and the half-strange room you have washed up in.
This is my mother's house; we flew here last night. We sat for a while on her patio drinking wine and then, after Karen went to bed, we moved into the living room and watched the World Series. Someone from the Rays hit a three-run home run, but the Dodgers came back and tied it up and went ahead again.
"The Dodgers are the better team," I told my mother in a tone of an overly serious 6-year-old, "but over a short series that's not much of an advantage."
We went to bed before the game was over, but not before we'd settled some important issues.
My mother's house is different now; she has sold off some heavy furniture and replaced the pale carpeting she kept miraculously clean with high-tech waterproof planking, similar to what we installed when we built our new house. It looks good and gives the place a sense of openness, it reels in some of the baroque eclecticism of Mom's aesthetic.
There is some Asian flavor reflecting her years as an Air Force wife, but mostly the place is done in early American cherry with bronze fixtures. All the pieces that remain are in perfect repair and dustless, just as I remember them from my childhood.
Her one concession to the imminent change is a folding table in the living room, covered by a tablecloth, where a smallish 42-inch Vizio flat-screen TV hooked up to a DirectTV box rests. This replaces the only thing I might have thought of as ugly in her home, one of those hulking '90s-vintage entertainment cabinets with the shelf for a tubed TV and others covered with glass to display a videocassette collection, or in Mom's case, photos of various family members.
"Some guy in South Carolina came and got it for his mother," Mom says. "He kept saying he was going to come and get it, he was going to come and get it, and finally [Mom's daughter] Jackie told him there were other people who wanted it so he drove down one Saturday and hauled it away."
The folding table is provisional; her son-in-law Porter has a TV stand that will take its place, and a larger TV. He's ditching DirectTV for Comcast. He'll wire up the Vizio in Mom's room, which isn't the master bedroom (it hasn't been for years) but a small bedroom at the end of the hall.
Jackie seemed to have been one of the chief engines behind the load lightening; she put a lot of items up on Facebook Marketplace and sold quite a few of them, including the carousel pony that had been in Mom's dining room so long that I'd stopped thinking of it as odd.
And what I thought of as a smaller living room, which was in a alcove open to the main living room, has been cleared of everything but a rocker and another TV, a discrete Samsung hiding on a table in the corner, There was a lady who wanted the couch but needed to check her bank account to see if she could afford it.
She called back, apologetic. "I can only raise $100," she said. Sold. Come haul it away.
Anyway, the house is in a period of transition.
Jackie and her husband Porter are moving in. The idea is that they will one day inherit the house from Mom, and she, at 83, would like to get out from under the myriad responsibilities of taking care of it. So they've negotiated an agreement where Mom will live with them and maintain title to the house while they are responsible for its upkeep, mortgage payments, property taxes and so forth.
Mom works in a law office and sat down with one of the partners there to draw up this unusual arrangement, so I trust everything is going to be all right. Mom is considering retiring next year, and when she does she plans on spending months with my other sister and her husband in south Louisiana and weeks with a close friend in Shreveport, both of whom are preparing permanent places for her. (She's also welcome to visit us in North Little Rock, but she knows we've downsized, and besides, no grandchildren live here. We don't mind driving to Shreveport a couple of times a year.)
So, she figures, she only needs a place to sleep and store her clothes in Savannah; And Jackie and Porter need to get out of the apartment where they've been living. Porter has started drawing Social Security; it's not that much because he took it early, but he's already getting his teachers' pensions from Texas and Georgia, and he's working part-time three days a week, shipping and receiving, going to work in cargo shorts.
And Jackie, Mom says, just lives for her grandkids. She's putting that Ph.D. in education to use home-schooling the rowdiest one.
I wouldn't argue that they don't have a vested interest in this house. They've always helped Mom maintain this place. Porter mows the yard and a couple of times a month cooks ribs on the fancy grill he keeps in her backyard. (And that he can work from his iPhone.)
If I had any qualms about the situation I guess I could voice them, but I don't know what good it would do. Most family decisions are presented to me as a fait accompli, which is what I get from living so far removed from headquarters. And I'm fine with that. I'm grateful I've got an 83-year-old mother who can conspire with relatives and come up with reasonable solutions to what, in other families, might be intractable problems.
If and when my mother ever dies, I don't want to have to sit down and sort through documents and argue about what should accrue to home. For years I've been advising her to spend her money, to accumulate experiences and memories and to give no thought to how her children might fare after she takes her leave.
All families are crazy, my friend Rufus Griscom once told me, and that feels true. I wonder about the ones that seem so close; I understand how volatile and explosive they can be. Friends of mine travel thousands of miles to look at the gravestones of their ancestors, to meet with strangers of common blood. I try to call my mother twice a week.
This is not my house; this is a house I may have spent a dozen nights in. I wake up in it a little disoriented, a little slow to grasp its reality. I don't know what direction it is facing, through which windows the sun will first slant.
It takes a moment for me to think of it as home.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@adgnewsroom.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.