I can’t make that reference work, but I tried. It’s evening of Christmas Day, my mother has departed for Colorado, and Maggie is simmering in her special sauce.

Just two days ago we realized she installed the loudest wind chimes ever, right before the massive cold front swept through and it was shockingly cold. After the deafening chimes began, she emailed again.

Here’s the damn email, barely doctored to continue the pretense I am protecting anyone’s identity.

And she has no rosemary or thyme growing anywhere I’ve seen and he would never block her. He faithfully follows her across platforms.

She’s posting on Facebook again, some real doozies.

I can barely type this right now but I need to document it. Living next door to her has meant picking up on clues late in the game and then attracting her doleful, torturing glare. So what am I missing now? What is going on?

There are classic memories alongside Ditmarston tall tales

She’s resurrecting her classics—brilliant musician husband who withheld music from brilliant children, and picking back up some of our shared classics—the time we beat her with the baseball bat and she caught in on camera. This is a favorite story she tells to everyone.

Calvin did, unfortunately, have a baseball bat in his hands when he asked her to drive away from where she was parked in front of our house in the middle of the night, headed the wrong way on a one-way street, blasting music and smoking cigarettes. I was calling 911. Daisy came out and took the bat away from Calvin, and I continued to berate the 911 operator to just send a car because she was really crazy all the time.

The day after this night, we hired a lawyer and we began truly hiding from her. I think I only blew up a few more times and it was fast. She did become truly scary that night because I could see that even Calvin could be pushed to fetching a baseball bat. It was the same night I sprayed the garden hose off our balcony into the sunroof of her car, when she was in it.

A great moment.

Take a look at the link below. If it is public, you can see the video of Calvin and the bat, with my voice droning on. The other video shows me telling her off while standing behind a big plant, so look like I have a stalk, not a body, and I do not smile ever. In this one, the me-and-the-plant video, the audio is terrible because Maggie filmed me while sitting in her dirty blow-up hot tub.

https://www.facebook.com/1235490900/videos/10217780712329605/

Does that work? I have this video somewhere in my files, or maybe I’ve posted it before. Maybe I can pull the audio and have a still with my sad, outraged face. Does my reaction even matter?

She criticized how I hang the laundry

Such a low blow! I have known that I hang the laundry in a way that might not be the classic way but I’ve thought through my reasons and I stand by my technique. We only have one line because the other one’s rope broke and I could not fix it. There were some strange episodes with fixing the one that remains fixed, and some neighborhood toughs. Long story. Maybe not worth telling.

I fought for my laundry line emotionally. My parents did not have a dryer and we had to air dry our clothes in the basement in the winter, and on the line in the summer, which was okay. But during the winter, it meant a lot of stress around having clean clothes to wear to school.

Once in my own dryer-equipped house, I considered abandoning the laundry line and sailing into the no-unnecessary anxiety future. But I couldn’t. The environmentalism from my childhood has me, so I hang all the laundry until it’s too cold, and then I dry everything. Hanging season is roughly October to spots in April, sometimes March. Global warming.

I have to maximize the space on my one line, so I hang all the small stuff on the basement rack while the rest go outside. Then I overlap the items. I drape them on the line. I don’t pin each corner to the line.

Maggie also has a laundry line and is proud of it. A few of the houses do. We don’t chat about it. I know the Chinese family favors hangers pinned on the line, which did not work for me after I tried it.

I think she imagines that I imitated her with the laundry. As I’ve testified above, laundry lines and me go way back.

Maggie vs Me: Laundry Line

	Maggie’s Laundry Style	Wendy Ditmarston’s Laundry Style
Laundry on line	Pinned	Draped and pinned
Number of items hanging on line	Approximately 6 or fewer	Many, an entire load minus socks/underwear
Time items spend on line	Multiple days to weeks to a month	Less than a day, overnight occasionally
Do the items hanging on the line send a message?	Often (though the message is never clear)	No

She took a swipe at me on Instagram yesterday, in a comment that referred to another comment about how in the olden times, her relatives sent messages to other women through laundry, and if you did it wrong, then everyone knew.

I told my mother and she sniffed and said, “Oh, that is so Irish. Terrible!”

What does that mean?

I got really mad at Christmas Eve dinner and told someone to snap out of their complaining

Why do I do stuff like that anymore? It’s when someone just talks at me and never asks me anything about myself. They just expect me to listen to them and admire them. I just couldn’t take it and I mini blew. Urf, that’s what I’m telling myself. I’m pissed at myself.

Do NOT tell Maggie I did that. She would be so into it.

One more tiny mean thing

Maggie posted a letter from 2015 written by a Kripalu person attesting to Maggie’s greatness as a mother. I do want to post it. The woman knew Maggie for a few weeks, while at some yoga retreat where Maggie was training to be a teacher, and met the daughter for a few hours. She misspelled the name of Maggie’s daughter throughout the letter as she swore that Maggie was a great parent and as a professor (of what?) the letter writer could spot them, those great mothers.

Yes, I can see the sadness of this letter but I would like to point out what a crappy reference letter it truly is.

Times Square was awesome

We ran through it in subzero weather, weaving through the tourists. I made my mother wear my hat (I had a good hood) and lectured her on how much harsher New York City is compared to Colorado, and that she needed to wear a warm hat, not a baseball hat like she brought. It was twelve degrees below zero!

But after I hatted her up and asked Wyatt (glorious, kind Wyatt) to keep an eye on her, I got on the Calvin/Daisy trail and we dodged tourists and enjoyed the lights. There weren’t that many tourists because it was so brutally cold but you still had to hop around them. The vendors were working their asses off, all those Elmos and Transformers and a pedicab driver.

At one point Calvin and I raised our arms to the sky and shouted “TIMES SQUARE” and screamed into the night. It’s the boardwalk of the City! I love NY.

Our play was cancelled due to no reason (the security guy didn’t know, but we all think covid) but Times Square was a special time.