At Work Upstairs

Week one of vacation has passed in a blur of traveling, visiting, clearing, chatting, and waiting. Not a particularly restful time but needful things were done.

I meant to take pictures but didn’t manage to drag out the camera in time to grab shots of the happy new nephew or the dancing niece or relatives or my old home town.

I spent most of the week clearing out my mother’s house, getting it ready for sale. She moved into an apartment with a better support system in November but the house was still full. It’s a small, post-WW II house, about 1200 square feet with a full attic and a full basement.

Exactly how full? Well, we filled a 12-foot dumpster and the house still wasn’t empty when I left. Somewhere over the last 4 or 5 years, frugality turned into hoarding. And hoarding coupled with memory problems meant that every nook and cranny was stuffed.

Some of it was easy to deal with: twenty years of nearly empty paint cans, broken and ancient appliances, empty cardboard boxes, empty bottles, packages and bottles of stale food, years and years of paid bills and receipts.

Some of it was odd: cracker boxes stuffed randomly amid the linen, caches of sanitary napkins, kitchen objects wrapped in tinfoil.

Some of it was smelly: cheese left on top the fridge, butter left on the the counter, and used kitty litter bagged up in a corner.

Much of it was sad: Bag after bag of fabric and sewing supplies, piles of craft supplies and projects for herself and her grandchildren, hundreds of reference photographs for her paintings. Each object represented a plan, a hope, a possibility. All that hope is gone now and that’s the hardest part. Not the sorting out of family heirlooms and memories but the discarding of projects she’ll never be able to finish.

She still thinks of herself as a person who can paint and sew and still has plans to make more art, more clothing, a new home. But the dementia has taken away much of her visual understanding and her understanding of spatial relationships. She’s only partially aware of this and so her plans go on even though she can’t thread a needle, draw shapes, follow a pattern, or easily manipulate tools like TV remotes or coffee makers.

She was a fiercely independent person and doesn’t and can’t understand why she is thwarted by the objects around her. She’s much diminished. Her bouts of sadness and frustration come and go with her attention span. We hope for a long plateau before the next inevitable set of declines and the next move away from independence.

Heather

I hate buying new footwear. Doesn’t matter if it’s boots, sandals, sneakers, or flip-flops. New shoes of any sort have always meant pain.

I have rather vivid memories of walking home from school with wearing new brown shoes and bloodstains. And the next day making the same journey with smaller bloodstains and bunched up bandages futilely trying to protect the open blisters on my ankles. This went on rather sadly for years with new shoes and old shoes until I figured out that I always needed to put on bandages whenever I put on footwear.

I tend to put off buying replacement shoes to the last possible moment. And then knowing that the shoes only mean pain, I often rush through the process just to get it over. Is the sneaker a palatable price? Yes. Is it a tolerable colour? Good. Does it fit? Seems to. And then out of the store. I went through this ritual one morning recently and thought I found a good match even if the sneakers are too white and are ugly.

I take them home. A couple hours pass and it’s time to put them to the test: bandages, the athletic socks, and the gleaming sneakers. My left foot is very happy, my right foot is not so sure. I head out to try to find some dirt to shuffle through to take the shininess down a notch. I come home in agony. My left foot is now deliriously happy. My right foot wants to be put out of its misery.

After several days spent agonizing over the waste of money and my willful mutant feet, I face the facts and head out to buy another pair of sneakers. I manage to find the next size up in the same style of not entirely hideous and still-on-sale sneakers. They too seem to fit and I trundle home.

Before boxing up the first pair to donate to the St Vincent de Paul and after moaning and groaning about how happy my left foot was in the first pair, I decide to try an experiment. Size 8 on the left foot. Size 8 and a 1/2 on the right. Amazing. They pass the walking to the grocery store and back test.

It’s as if the heaven’s have opened and shown me the way. My feet are different sizes. The mind boggles: all those years with painful blisters and thousands of bandages.

Anyone out there who needs an 8 1/2 left and an 8 right?

Heather

At the doldrums of my workday, I heard Douglas trooping upstairs and I yelled out: “Is there candy?” The usual reply is “NO” and an eyeroll. (Yes, yes, “usual” suggests that when I’m grumbly and bored some part of my brain thinks candy can be magicked out of thin air.)  No response. I stuck my head out to repeat myself cause he might just be ignoring me. He rounded the corner and said “YES”.

When I regained consciousness, he handed me a package with a customs sticker on it that clearly said “candy”.  Elizabeth had sent me candy from her Japan dai boken! And a little card with more stickers.

Japanese Candy

There was a small argument about whether we’d open the packages. But calmer minds prevailed.

Banana Kit-Kat has to be the oddest tasting confectionary I’ve ever had. Each nugget has a yellow, nearly waxy coating that smells very, very banana-like. The banana “flavour” overpowers the interior wafers.

At first glance the Hello Kitty candy looks like wax on a bamboo skewer. It turns out to be a strawberry flavoured coating on top of pretzel-like pocky.

So many thanks to Elizabeth for the afternoon surprise.

Heather