Comforts

I can't begin to tell you how this blog comforts me.  When I am helpless and unable to do anything, I can write, I can be in control.  It is my day off and so I slept in.  I am trying to recover from the long work week.  I chose to stay home while the garage
door company refits our garage door, to the tune of six hundred forty dollars or so.   I will go visit my mother later this afternoon.  It will give the therapists, doctors, nurses and aides the opportunity to work with her to make her better.  I called the therapist to ask about appropriate clothing for my mother.  She told me to wait and see, that for now a hospital gown is okay, later she can wear the clothes she wore at home, pull on slacks and blouse.  I need to check the guidelines for room decorations.  It is a semi private room and my mother's room mate has taken over with her cards and plants.  However she is very sweet and offered to move some of them.  I will check to see if we can adhere a poster to the closet door or the wall.  One of the sites I visited, suggested making an "all about me" book.

My mother was one of 10 children. When she was 16 years old, she moved about 250 miles from her birth town to live with her sister.  My dad was her sister's friend and it was through her sister that she met my dad.  I guess they were driving somewhere and my dad told her sister, "I don't want to sit next to her!"  (He was shy!).  They were married in her hometown  65 years ago.  My mother worked as a switchboard operator at "The Bell" and at the bank and also as a desk clerk at an inn.  In her free time, she was a Girl Scout Leader for my troop, she drove my brother to baseball games and my sister to ballet.  She was at peace in the yard weeding her rose bushes and her hedge.  She spent many hours playing pinochle, bridge and euchre.  At Christmas time, she would bake 20 fruit cakes to give as gifts.  She never missed a year traveling to Florida or up north, riding in the truck which pulled the "condo on wheels" (30' travel trailer).  On Labor Day, pedestrians are allowed to walk from the northern side of the Mackinac Bridge to the south.  She would drive my dad across the bridge so that he could do the walk.  This past summer, we camped, going to the Shrine in the Woods and to dinner at Papa Lou's in Petoskey.   She would hop in her wheelchair and we would tool around the park and she would read the names on the trailers and 5th wheels, "Winnebago, Palomino, Starcraft, Cobra, Tioga."  She would build a roaring campfire and tell us, "I used ONE match!"  My mother could hold long conversations.  I'd be chatting with my mother for so long that my husband's mother would call the operator to check the line!  She and my dad are founding members of their church parish, and she is a powerful prayer warrior.  She has three children, thirteen grand children and six great grandchildren.