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Showing posts from August, 2016

A Child's Tale

My grandchildren love off-the-wall-things. Today, I let them spray shaving lotion on my desk, smear it around, draw in it, and eventually clean it up. My youngest granddaughter drew our house. She had all the parts and even had all of us in it, to include my recently deceased mother. To those that came in, she took joy in naming the parts of the house and the people in it. Then I asked her, "You love this old house, don't you?" "Uh huh," she answered "Why" She studied a moment and said, "Because you're in it?" Sometimes I wonder how much usefulness I have left here in this world and then I hear something like this. I am loved, I am needed, and someone's world is made better because I am in it. Thanks God. I needed that.

A Mother's Story

She was 102 when she died after surviving assisting living residence and two nursing homes for six and a half years. My mother was tough. In the assisted living, at one time or the other, there had been bad food, flies in dining room, roaches running wild, mice crawling all over, cricket swarms, inattentive care, lost hearing aids, heating and A/C units that often failed, and falls from which she lay on a hard floor for hours waiting on aides to find her. In the nursing homes, she survived many wounds to her legs from aides trying to transfer her to her wheelchair. She subsisted on food that only someone with a sturdy set of jaws and teeth could eat. She made it through being left unattended in her wheelchair for hours. She recovered time and again from the blistered bottom and the consequent urinary tract infections caused by being left soaked in her urine for hours. She made it through quarantine for a bowel virus caused by antibiotics. But finally she could not overcome