A Fiction Book and Real Life

Today my dad and I went to the nursing home to spend the afternoon with my mom.

Thursday is 'current events' day, so we went with mom to that.

A group of residents gather in a pretty room with windows on both sides looking out to a very small yet well maintained garden. An events coordinator reads to them from several publications.

Not all that much 'paying attention' was going on today, and I wondered how the reader kept it together. Someone choked. Someone smelled foul. Nurses appeared in the middle of everything and stuffed pills down throats. Someone got hurt feelings and cried. I watched a sprinkler in the garden going round and round, and noticed that my mom was doing the same thing.

In some ways, it is much like my days with Jonge and Famke.

Except for the obvious reality that there is hope that Jonge and Famke will someday lose the need for diapers, stop choking on cookies, manage a glass of juice on their own and be able to dress themselves. That hope is gone for many of the people attending 'current events' at the home today.

I was reminded of the Elizabeth Goudge book that I just finished, "The Scent of Water". The book begins with the death of an elderly woman, Mary Lindsay, who spent the last years of her life suffering from dementia. She leaves her lovely home in the English countryside to her cousin's daughter whom she only met once and whose name is also Mary Lindsay.

Her beloved home has the very same name as the nursing home where my mom resides.

In the book, much attention is paid to the first Mary Lindsay's collection of 'little things', tiny precious treasures she kept under glass in a beautifully handcrafted chest.

I looked around the home today, the home with the same name as the lovely English country house from my book, and saw many precious treasures.

Fragile, yet safely kept until their rightful owner comes to claim them.

The book opens with a passage from the book of Job:

For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof was old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.