I see it’s been just over six months since my last post, which is certainly not what I had planned when I started the year.

In mid-January, however, I walked back into the house after an errand and my mom looked at me and said, “Who are you?”. This from a woman who at 97 had been showing no signs of any form of dementia. The episode didn’t last long but did lead me to put in a frantic call to our doctor. When I described what was happening, he immediately said she probably had a urinary tract infection (UTI). I thought he must be nuts or had misunderstood what I said but found out that this type of episode is very common in elderly people with UTIs.

Mom started on antibiotics immediately, of course, but she really had a hard time of it. I spent one night holding her hand, sure she was not going to see the morning. She became extremely weak, to the point she couldn’t even stand up by herself. When I had to leave the house, I hired people to look after her, which is an exhausting process in itself as I had to keep instructing new people.

Mom has now fully recovered but for two months or so maintaining this blog was more work than I could deal with. And then I just fell out of the habit as I didn’t seem to have anything to say. Hoping to do better in the future!

Here’s another view of the coyote:

My first try at making a Lily of the Valley plant. I have some ideas for improvements if I ever do it again, but, overall, I am satisfied.

Mom wishes you all a Merry Christmas:

Busy week so far, but here are pictures from some early morning walks this week:

Can you spot the rabbit?

Here it is!

Mom and I have been looking at photographs from my childhood days and every year there were pictures of big Christmas trees. It was one splurge we made on a regular basis. I think that’s what led mom to say that it would be nice to have a big tree this year; we haven’t had a full size one in a long time.

These days there are lots of artificial ones to choose from and here’s the one that we brought home:

The lights were pre-strung and the tree looked quite good when they were on but a little bare when they were off. I happened to have a few sheets of holiday themed paper and some heavy card stock, so I made very simple flowers with a silver bauble in the center and some bind wire:

99 flowers later, here’s the tree, both lit and unlit:

Daisy is the “grandparent” I know the least about. She is almost a total enigma: I don’t even know her birth or death dates. Although she was a major factor in raising my dad and my brother and I, I know almost nothing about her life or interests.

Daisy was adamant that no one know her age. So much so that while she was still in the Maryland area and needed gall bladder surgery, she traveled to California to have it done, and in the first decades of the 1900s that was not an insignificant trip! She did this because she didn’t want to be a patient in the hospital she worked at: she was afraid her coworkers might find out how old she was.

Mom remembers she and dad taking Daisy up to visit relatives on the Maryland/Pennsylvania border in the 1940s. She had a sister named Myrna that lived with Nana and Daisy for a while when they were in California and another sister who married and moved out to California as well. There was also a brother somewhere.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, Daisy moved in with my dad’s mother to help out after Nana got divorced. They lived together from that point on. After Nana died, Daisy seemed to slip out of my life as she was taken care of by her sister’s relatives. I don’t know for sure, but I think she died while I was still at college.

My brother and I always felt that Daisy was a bit of a “sour puss” and not near as much fun as the other grandparents. It was only long after she was gone that I found out from my mother that the reason Daisy never smiled was that she was ashamed of her teeth. That was one reason she never liked having her picture taken, so, of course, my dad made sure to snap as many shots as he could.

Daisy was very conservative in her religion: I remember she didn’t like the fact that as a kid I played solitaire with a regular deck of cards; she called them the “devil’s cards”. And woe betide we kids if we put another book on top of a Bible, or worse, put the Bible on the floor beside us!

Yet, weirdly, I can’t remember either she or Nana going to church. I just asked my mom about it and she has no memory of them doing so either. And yet Daisy was definitely a Seventh-day Adventist.

The only story I ever heard about Daisy’s youth was that she was at a county fair and Charles Lindenbergh was there. This woman who I always knew as conventional and reserved actually went up in a plane with him! If I had been told this as a child, I would have found it inconceivable.

I wish I had had a chance to know this woman after I grew up. I feel I really missed out by not getting to know her.