I stayed home from church today, so I was the person that went to assist Dad with getting up. After accomplishing that I decided to wash up the dishes and clean the kitchen in my parents’ apartment. For the most part, Mom is able to wash her own dishes and wants to continue to do so…the only problem is Mom fell out of the daily dish washing habit about 20 or 30 years ago. She prefers to let them stack up until there is enough to bother with. I realize that many households are comfortable with this way of doing dishes so this is not a judgment about that…it is just that Mom’s kitchen work space is cluttered and piled and it drives me nuts…so I sat myself to the task of cleaning a bit…in the process I chittered chattered killing time trying to make sure that Dad was going to accomplish eating all of his breakfast so that he would be ready for a light lunch at 2:30.
Feeling pretty secure that all was on track, I asked him if cheesy rice sounded good for lunch…he agreed that would be good. Since, my family does not eat American cheese, I started to get some out of Mom’s fridge…she then instructed me where to get it… “Not on the top shelf, but the other one.” (Mom literally has at least 20 lbs of cheese in her fridge) Thinking it would be helpful to me in fixing Dad’s lunches, I asked if I could just take one of the packages to the house with me…. “No, just take a couple of slices…”
This is Mom…her stuff matters to her. She is 91 years old and she cannot only tell you right where she left something in a closest 5, 10, or 25 years ago but she will be able to describe the print on the fabric and the size. She has a steal trap memory about her stuff. And lest any of us think we can pull a fast one and throw something out…we would be wrong. In the years of being a caretaker, I have never thrown anything out without first getting permission and many times when I have asked it is denied. There are cabinets and boxes of stuff here, there and yonder. The only reason she didn’t know where the green trash can was in my former post was because I had moved it in order to vacuum the floor. I had put it up on the bottom shelf of a plant stand. I will occasionally toss out a plastic butter box or a used zipper baggie but even then I do that kind of thing in moderation!
So while the cheese incident left me briefly miffed, in the end I really just had to laugh!
By the way, it seems that Dad has gradually improved some more this week. He only had one bad day this past week. It also seems as if his eyes improve some which I am very thankful for. This time last year he was unable to discern who was coming in the door. Now he can read the clock on the mantel across the room. For this we are most thankful.