Postcards from America

Five moments in a Midwest summer

I’ve just returned home to Portugal after 15 days in the States. My husband, daughter, and I traveled to Illinois to spend time with my mom and dad and give my sister and her family a break from parent-watching.

These trips are never really a vacation, and I look forward to and loathe them in equal measure. I savor the small delights of soft-serve ice cream and fresh sweet corn and Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage and big red barns and the lush green fields every which way you look.

But seeing my mom is a different story. Alzheimer’s has been hard at work mining holes in her memory for nearly a decade now. More than a year has passed since she lost track of who my sister and I are. So visiting my mother now is like watching an alien animate a body that once belonged to someone beloved. It’s by turns devastating and bizarre.

Each time I see her she is further away.

But it’s not just the tangled threads of love and rage and duty and despair. It’s also the America of it all. As I texted one of my friends from the middle of the Midwest when she asked how it was going: “It’s… a lot.”

So instead of one big story about an Illinois July, I have five smallish ones for you. Postcards, if you will…