skip to main |
skip to sidebar
When I was younger, I never really understood sentimental gardening. Now it's one of my favorite things about gardening.
I love knowing the history of my plants. My Canna Tropicanna was a present from my singing teacher, Red, about 12 years ago. She thought it was lost when her cranky landlord got on his tractor and plowed her garden under. After my singing lesson one day a few months later I spied Tropicanna coming up in the field. We dug it up and split the rhizome so we could each have some. Recently, years after Red's passing, I split some Tropicanna off and gave it to my current singing teacher, who was also a student of Red's. Red's plant, like her teaching, lives on in our gardens.
You can see, then, how I kinda view one's plants as an extension of self, and how passing up a wizened Christmas cactus at an estate sale might be an impossibility for me. I like 'em near-dead and try to bring them back to life. I purchased my neighbors Max and Berniece's Christmas cactus at their estate sale last year. It was droopy and sad, but after my tender ministrations gave me pretty pale pink blooms this year. Grandpa, who I saw at an estate sale I passed on the way to a funeral, has perked up phenomenally and gave me many blooms in February.
I keep hoping to collect *different* types of Christmas cactus, that bloom in different colors, but in the state I find them in there's no way to tell what you're getting. And some day I will get what I really want, which is one that blooms red. But I don't believe in going down to Home Depot to do so. That would be wrong...
Anyhoo, I thought I had totally scored when I bought another cactus last year. If it lived. It was so dry that its legs (or whatever you call them) were crispy like potato chips. There was some new growth, and it looked like it was rosy red. I hoped that maybe my red-blooming cactus desires had been fulfilled. Instead I have a new friend with a different flower form, who blooms his little head off in May. Love him.
Here he is before I trimmed off the dead parts (it's worth clicking to see a bigger photo and appreciate how bad off he was:
and after cleanup:
and here he is three months later after a little shade and water:
and here he is this week:
It makes me so happy to see him come to life.
UPDATE: Turns out that he is actually an EASTER cactus. I love him even better, now!
We're mixing it up this week, with me taking care of the mammoo alongside a caregiver. The caregiver is amazing. She's helped her do her exercises, given her a sponge bath, done the laundry, and I think she's doing the dishes right now. Did I mention that she cleaned the bathroom?
This lets me do things like make meals and check my work email on occasion. And bathe. So weird to use my ancestral bathtub, the one from when I was a baby. It's a bizarre color of orange, and the mammoo hasn't used it in years because she takes showers.
In today's tub adventure, there was a silverfish that had to be encouraged to leave. Then I turned on the tap and a lot of rusty water came out. Eew. Eventually I got my bath in. But I still had to look at this glum gal, "Child in Straw Hat" by Mary Cassat. There's another sad child print over the bathtub.
No wonder this bathroom is mildly depressing!
I'm back at Mom's, and during the night she said these three things:
"Tough, isn't it, mister?"
"I didn't have anything important to say."
"Why am I so thirsty?"
When I told her what she'd said in her sleep she really cracked up.
"We should really start recording these things. You don't need any company when you have yourself!"
There you are.
A month later, I sleep on the sofa in the family room. Sweet mammoo is snoozing in her hospital bed on the other side of the room.
The last month has been DENSE, insane, filled with experiences I thought I'd never have, conversations I didn't want to have, questions on deadline that we children all had differing opinions on. It's a wild ride. But some of us have had a bit of a reprieve since my Broham and sister-in-law (nurses) have volunteered to stay with the mammoo until she can bear weight on the broken leg. We broke her out of rehab and brought her home.
Now that we've seen the xrays, we know how broken she was. Her femur? Broken in two places, long-ways. Inner Trochanter? Also broken. But now that she has a titanium rod through her femur from above the knee through the ball of her hip joint, and another pin in the hip joint (and six pins holding the titanium in place) she'll never break that thing again.
The physical therapist in the rehab place said that there are real challenges when people with mild dementia have these kind of breaks with weight bearing restrictions. As they feel more like themselves, they have impulses that go unchecked. You hope that the bones mend before the decide to get up and then re-break their bones. Wow. We have two more weeks of this nail-biting part of the program.
And of course the bad part about bringing Mom home for the second half of her non weight-bearing recovery is that there is no shower or tub here. Just a half bath. How to bathe the mama? Middlesis decided that bro and sis should bring her to my house, 45 minutes away. That seemed like a weird idea. Then they decided to rent a hotel room for the day. That was also a weird idea, but it worked. I got a transfer bench from Home Depot, and put it together with help from my brother *only* for the harder screws at the very end. I was very proud of myself.
We put it and the mama and a wheelchair into the car and went to the local, sleazy HoJo. We rented a room, got her into the tub via the transfer bench, and then ablutions ensued. Mom said "I bet you never thought you'd be doing this, huh?" Which was true. But it was all quite jolly and she much appreciated it. At the end of the day, I found us Japanese food and the Broham made mama lots of bacon and things that go with bacon. Then the local baseball team won (thankthelord) and we all went to bed.
Another odd but interesting happening is the following: two days after mama broke her hip, I went to the doctor for my persistent cough. There I met a woman who was having a physical. She took a personal call in the waiting room, then turned to me and said "My 89-year-old mom broke her hip on Monday." Then I said "My 87-year-old mom broke her hip on Wednesday". Over the last few weeks of texting we have learned that we live in the same town. I went to library school and she used to sell library software. We both love cats, and both have Hashimoto's thyroiditis. Both grew up in the same part of the state. Our schools played each other in sports. We may eventually find that we don't have the big things in common, but we've found a bond with each other through our shared experiences with our moms, and it's been exceptionally nice to have someone outside the family to talk to about this.
