When I have a moment or two here in the Kingdom of Pillville, I sometimes take a little Google tour of the questions that have been patiently waiting in the back rooms of my mind. Here's a souvenir from today's tour:
types of dementia. Sometimes my mother's memory loss is startling. Certain old stories seems stuck like glue, while other pieces of her past have simply dissolved. Or like she's cleaned out the closet in her brain. Keep this. Get rid of that.
Sometimes a conversation takes a weird turn like tonight when we began talking about the grandchildren she's lost track of due to an acrimonious divorce. "Those boys might be farmers," she said, insisting they could farm the acreage they grew up on though said acreage has never been actively farmed by them or their mother. I feel like
I might be coming down with some kind of sudden-onset dementia during conversations like this. I go micro instead of macro, trying to figure out if she means who I think she means or if I wasn't listening carefully. Or if the land was actually farmed--maybe a hobby farm all these years, and I just didn't know. Or if she means they might farm their other grandmother's farm which really was a farm. I ask too many questions trying to straighten out the snarl of information I can feel tightening somewhere around my cerebellum when I should probably just say, "Yep, those boys might be farmers! Yep, they sure could be farmers!" And then change the subject.
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| my mother and her twin sister and their brother and one of the family milk cows--now these kids could have been farmers! |
Tonight's conversation ending up with her exclaiming that anyone could farm if they just got a horse and a plow--or a tractor. I wanted to say that nothing is farther from the truth. And get into how, nowadays, most people in the U.S. would starve if they had to grow their own food. But I didn't get into that.
We talked about raising puppies instead, and I whipped the iPad over to the table and showed her pictures of the St. Bernard puppies that my brother's wife's brother (Are you following me? It's a little test....) and his family raise in Iowa. Puppies. There's a subject that can rescue a lot of dinner conversations. Go ahead,
try it. Before you start feeling like this:
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| my mother's mother--as posed by her son (the young man in the photo above) who, I'm told, had quite a sense of humor |
