Good day and welcome! Come in and join me for a cup of coffee and a chat. I already had my coffee this morning. So I’ll once again settle for a cup of peppermint tea.

If we were chitchatting, I would tell you winter has somewhat returned this week with temperatures dipping back into the 30’s and 40’s-degrees-Fahrenheit. I had to bring all my plants into the house to keep them from freezing.

“What are we now? A Greenhouse?” Mom said. The only plant she likes in the house is her lucky bamboo. She’s been pouting lately because of the greenery in the house.

I have come to love plants in the house. It gives the house a sense of life and makes me feel like this is my house, not just this place full of mom’s things and a thing I waste one of my paychecks each month for. “This is my house, mine.” I’ve been correcting people whenever someone say this is my mom’s house.

She has a house, down the block. She keeps telling me she must move in for tax purposes but when? “There’s no internet in the house.” She’d complain when I confront her. “How am I supposed to sleep at night?”

She now listens to Cantonese operas all through the night. I think it’s on a YouTube playlist. It plays 24 hours a day and she plays it at top volume. Sometimes, the whiny sounds of the instruments would startle me awake in the middle of the night. “Exactly how many episodes are there?” I asked one day.

“Hundreds,” she replied with a grin. Great, I thought.

If we were chitchatting, I would tell you I witnessed a spectacle last weekend. We were at the Asian grocery store and mom wanted to change parking space for reasons I still cannot fathom. All she had to do was to keep the steering wheel straight and back into the space.

Instead, she kept turning the wheel left and right. “What is she doing?” I asked my aunts.

“How should I know?” My aunt answered and then she shouted to mom, “just keep the wheel straight.”

Inside, I was thinking, “This is the woman who taught me to drive?”

I am a learn-by-observing-kind-of-person. After watching my aunt successfully back into a parking space, I began practicing and been practicing at my work’s parking garage and whenever I go to the hospital for my doctor’s appointments. The spaces are tight and found myself having trouble backing out of a parking space. So I started backing into the space instead.

So far so good and I think I’m getting better at backing into a parking space.

“Do you need help?” I asked mom.

“No,” she said, irritated, “and shut up. I know what I’m doing.”

Okay, if you mean to park crooked and your front wheels in an odd angle, then I guess you know what you’re doing.

If we were chitchatting, I would thank you for joining me in this edition of #weekendcoffeeshare and hope we’ll both return next week.