“Genealogy is interesting, but at my great age it gets confusing.” Sybil (Tyler) Sharp, age 100, August 22, 2009.

For years I recorded mom reciting memories of her life and ancestors. I had the recordings that were on tiny fragile cassette tapes copied onto CDs and gave my brother and nephew a copy. I recorded her in her 80s and 90s, and once in her 70s. We've gone through photos and I've written names and dates and relationships on the back of the photos.

I finally stopped recording and just listened to the stories. The dates got blurred, people once married to one person were now married to someone else.

I exaggerate. But I did realize that going back over it all was probably not necessary. So I stopped.

But then it became clear that she was still able to tell a good story. Sometimes she needs a little redirecting, but then will come up with a name, a date, a place--or a story. Lately she gets confused if I ask too many questions.

Today I asked her to think of the name of her great great maternal grandparents. She touched my leg and said, "let me think about it." Tomorrow she'll probably have the answer.

I realized she could be a resource for others with whom we have ancestors in common. How many people have a 100-year-old lucid relative. Not many.

Today I also asked her about her grandmother Iantha Scoville Tyler.

She remembers her grandmother Iantha as a "very very cold person," who never gave her any love.

Then I had a story for her, one that she didn't know. Because of research I had been doing on the genealogy, I learned that her great grandmother Lydia, Iantha's mother, had given birth to eight children. From 1841 to 1853 she lost five sons and one daughter, all between the age of one and two.

Then Iantha was born, and lived. Then another daughter, Theodora. Then Lydia's husband, William Holly Scoville, died when Theodora was three and Iantha was five. How does one bear up under that kind of grief? Apparently, she didn't, because then she died, too.

How this must have affected Iantha and Theodora.

I told mom that most certainly her grandmother, who was left an orphan to be raised by an uncle, had good reason to be a little reserved.

Hopefully I was able to give my mother new insights about a woman who she felt was never there for her in the way she would have liked.

Those that do, and those that don't

Just like when Jared was two and I was tuned into other mothers with a two-year-old, now I'm tuned in to people who are caretaking their parents. I notice the 50 and 60-something women taking their moms to the market. Many of our friends have aging parents. That's the generation we are. It's also what you do. It's how you do it that has changed.

My niece in-law, Nga, asked me recently if I had ever considered moving mom into my house. Yes and no, I said. Mom lived with me for eight months when she was 83, I was 46, and Jared was 9. It didn't work very well. She moved into a retirement home, I moved into my bedroom that she had been using, and we all got on with our lives much more peacefully. Besides that, she didn't need my care. She wanted companionship and involvement in our lives. She still got that, but we all had more space to breathe.

Now it's really not much different. Mom, at 100, still wants her independence as long as she can keep it. She is still able to get herself up to the bathroom in the night after the caregiver leaves. As long as she can do that, she'll stay where she is.

And once she needs full-time care, I wouldn't move her here. It wouldn't work for any of us. My role is to visit, take her to doctor's appointments, make decisions, pay bills, and care for her needs...and then go home.

In Nga's culture, Vietnamese, mom and dad move in. Nga's four brothers took care of her parents when they were old.

Our culture, and my family, are more fragmented. My brother and one nephew are in Southern California. My son is in Seattle. Another nephew is in Australia. None are available to offer more than peripheral support. They love their mom and grandma, but no way would any of them take on the responsibility of having grandma live with them.

By default, one child in a family ends up as caretaker. They are fortunate when siblings participate, as do my brother and his wife. They offer verbal support, call mom, help with hard decisions, and come visit when they can. Is it enough? Not always, but it is what it is, and I carry no resentment toward them.

I don't always like this role as caretaker and its attendant responsibilities...but it's a privilege.

I just hope someone considers it a privilege to take care of me when the time comes.

"What am I going to do without this old lady?"

Those were the words of Arabella Hicks, protagonist in "The Fiction Class," a book I was reading in the waiting room at the Yakima Heart Center. Arabella was referring to her mother she visits each week in a nursing home. Arabella has a challenging relationship with her mother, but recognizes the love between them.

I wept.

I was waiting for mom while she had an ultrasound to determine whether or not she had blood clots in her legs. The day before we were there to determine whether or not she was eligible for surgery to open up her arteries to increase blood flow to reduce swelling and pain.

Nothing life-prolonging, just comfort measures.

We discovered she does not need surgery, but should be wearing support hose, which she wore every day until a wound on her leg wouldn't heal. Her primary doctor had decided a vascular scan was important, which led to unnecessary speculation about the pros and cons of surgery for a 100-year-old woman and the advice to not wear her hose because of the vascular disease. We requested a consult with a specialist, thus the visit to the Heart Center to see a cardiologist.

The visit to the center the day before lasted two and a half hours, punctuated by brief visits, first from an intake nurse who mom couldn't hear, then a nurse who did a quick EKG, then a physician's assistant, who was in awe that mom was 100, and finally, the cardiologist who told her first about how Dick Cheney came to Yakima and the Secret Service interviewed him because he was on-call at the hospital at the time of Cheney's visit.

Mom interrupted him and said, "So, what about surgery?"

He first said, "I just want to say, 'it's an honor to meet you.'"

I sometimes feel like mom is a rock star and I'm her manager, orbiting around her little world, making sure everything goes as planned.

After he told us about the encounter with the secret service officer, who by the way, "was built like a fireplug," mom told him that a doctor once told her that she had "one of those hearts that would beat forever."

I thought, "really, I believe it."

The doc told her she didn't need surgery, but she did need to reduce the swelling in her legs and prescribed physical therapy at a lymphedema clinic (been there, done that, but here we go again). He also prescribed a medicine that he cautioned me about.

"If she gets confused, stop it immediately."

After I dropped mom off, I called my brother on my way to the store to buy a six-pack. I told him all about the visit and that the recommendation about surgery was off-course, that her problem was the lymphedema. I told him about the drug and we hung up.

A few minutes later I called back and said, "I forgot to tell you about the drug he prescribed for mom."

My brother said, "You mean the one that causes confusion."

Genealogy tales

My Aunt Marge compiled the Goudey and Porter genealogies (paternal grandparents) some years back and distributed them among the relatives. I have looked at it over the years, marveling at my ancestors longevity in the 1600s, noting where they lived, when they moved from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia, and how closely connected we all really are.

But one thing had me puzzled in the Porter genealogy. James Porter (son of Hezediah II, who was born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia), was born in Deerfield, Portage, Ohio in 1789. Suddenly Hezediah got a hankering to head to Ohio? James's 11 children are also born in Deerfield, Portage, Ohio.

According to Marge, my great great grandfather, Ebenezer Corning Porter, was also born in Deerfield, Portage, Ohio. But oops, his son, my great grandfather Titus Hurlburt was born in Deerfield, Yarmouth. This was just strange.

Finally, yesterday, I came upon a Web site constructed by Ken Goudey. He had a page on "other immigrants," including the Porters.

Aha. James was born, as were his children, in Ohio, all right. But not Ohio, the state, but a tiny town named Ohio, Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. I googled Ohio, Yarmouth, and there it was, including Deerfield just up the road. An addendum on James pedigree says he bought land near Hooper's Lake and Salmon River. Also up the road from Ohio.

Somehow my aunt got it all mixed up. But genealogy is not a one-time, it's-all-done sort of thing. It takes persistence to figure it all out, and then you only have pieces of it, primarily because the female genealogy was rarely recorded.

I emailed my cousin Cheryl, and her son, Tom, who has been working on the family genealogy. She wrote back and said, "You're a good detective. Now find our Mayflower connection." Right.

In the process of solving one mystery, another mystery was also solved. A woman I plan to meet in Foxborough, Mass. is my relative on the Goudey and Porter side. Our great great grandfathers, Ebenezer Porter and Moses Porter, were brothers, traced back to John and Mary Porter, who landed in Hingham, Mass. in 1635 or so. Both our grandmother Porters married Goudeys. Our Goudey line can be traced back to George Goudey, who landed in America in 1735 with wife, Elizabeth Morgan, who is buried at Marblehead, Mass.

Clear as mud, but worth slogging through it.

Frozen Tomatos

I have so many tomatoes I'm not sure what to do with them. Ben doesn't seem that interested in them, even if I say, "Hey, why not slice that beautiful tomato and put it on top of your pizza."No, he suggests I make tomato sauce."Not to add to your work," he adds.But I googled how to freeze tomato sauce and found a great recipe. Cook, pulverize, freeze. My kind of recipe.Today was cooler than it's been in weeks.As I sat at my desk a breeze on my back brought the smell of rain. Not much rain, but enough to wash the leaves and remind me fall is coming all too soon.

Time travels

I've been researching my genealogy, preparing for our trip east the end of September, traveling in time to Salem, Hingham, Wenhem, Roxbury, Andover and Marblehead in what was once the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where my paternal and maternal ancestors gathered in the 1600 and 1700s.

I always get a little nervous before I fly so researching the lives of my ancestors gives me a little perspective.

John and Mary Porter arrived in 1635 in Hingham Bay, MA, on the boat the Susan and Ellen, immigrating from England to a far-off shore on a tiny ship to start a new life. Once in Hingham, they settled for awhile, but eventually migrated north to the Salem area, making a life I can barely imagine.

Their grandson, John Porter II, lived a robust life to 95 and had 11 children, whose average age at death was 87. A couple of his children lived to 100. The lineage of his wife, Lydia Herrick, can be traced back to the 1400s in England, unusual for the women in the genealogies.

John and Lydia's son, Nehemiah, moved to Nova Scotia and was 92 when he died. His grandson Hezediah was 96 when he died, leaving 9 children, 61 grandchildren, 108 grandchildren and 1 great great grandchild.

George and Elisabeth Goudey landed in Marblehead, MA in 1735. His son, James, was the first Goudey to head to Yarmouth. His descendants, including my grandparents, were born mostly in Port Maitland, a tiny coastal village near Yarmouth, where my grandfather caught lobster by simply overturning rocks. Not these days.

The Porters met up with the Goudeys and all the other relatives (remember the women were all descended from someone, too.) all of whom had gone seeking a new life in Nova Scotia.

Meanwhile, the Tylers, my maternal ancesters, were making a life in Andover, Woburn, or Roxbury, all in the vicinity of the Porters and the Goudey's before heading to Michigan.

I'd love to know Elizabeth Goudey and Mary Porter, who arrived on these shores in small ships, leaving a life they had known for the unknown in every sense of the word.

Surely, I can invoke their spirit to make a trip east in an airplane without being nervous.

Evangeline's trail

When my mother was in eighth grade she memorized 22 lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline. Over the years, she would recite the lines, impressing me always that she could continue, into her 90s, to remember what she had learned at 12.

Today we talked about Evangeline again. Ben and I are traveling to my paternal grandparents' birthplace in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia in October. I told her about our reservations at a B&B just off Highway 1, the Evangeline Trail. I asked her if she knew the history and she said, "Oh yes, the...who are they, now?...they were expelled from Nova Scotia."

I went to get her copy of "Evangeline," from the bookshelf. It was published in 1909 the year my mother was born, and given to her for Christmas 1918 by her Uncle Dan. The historical preface says, "in so far as it is inspired by facts, Longfellow's Evangeline is based on the historic event known as the 'expulsion of the Acadians' from Nova Scotia in 1755."

"Oh, that's right, the Acadians," she said.

Once again, at my behest, she recited those lines. Her facility of expression, her near perfect diction, her sparkling eyes reminds me how blessed she is, how blessed I am, that she has her mind and wits about her.

Then she said, "I used to have instant recall."

I laughed and said, "I've never had instant recall."

In spite of all the drama surrounding the daily business of attending to a centenarian, my mother's life is a gift to me.