May Day. It's hard to believe that April is already gone! I guess it seemed like such a short month because we spent a good part of the middle of it on the Texas trip.
We were up early this morning, since it was water aerobics day. The pool was pretty nippy...br-r-r. Our leader wore a wreath of yellow silk roses with leaves on her head, in celebration of May Day. She has headdresses and hats for every occasion, so we never know what she'll turn up in.
I left the session early today, since Mother and I were scheduled to meet with the Caring Hands Hospice group at 10 a.m. to help put together a memory book for an elderly Alzheimer's patient. This will be used to aid him in remembering family members and their names.
I knew that Mother and I would be late getting to the meeting, since it takes a while to get home, shower, and dress, even when I leave water aerobics fifteen minutes early, so I had alerted the Caring Hands leader that we'd be late. But we were later than we intended, since when we arrived at the home medical office where we'd had the meeting last month, we learned that it was being held at a local bank instead. I didn't get word that the meeting place had changed.
Fortunately, the bank is just down the street from the home medical office, so we were only about 30 minutes late in arriving. The others hadn't accomplished much by the time we got there, so we all got busy and completed the memory book by lunch time.
We were asked to bring sack lunches with us, so we could stay after the memory book session and watch a video. Well, Mother and I brought PB&J sandwiches and grapes, but the others ordered pizza. We stuck with our sandwiches, even though the pizza smelled good. It was very greasy and decidedly not heart healthy.
The video, featuring grief counselor, Doug Manning, was very informative in its message about appropriate ways to comfort people who have lost loved ones. Manning writes books intended to be sent to grieving people at specific intervals...third week, third month, sixth month, and eleventh month. The thrust of his talk was to just listen and not try to cheer up the bereaved, or try to talk them out of their grief with empty platitudes.
Today, the Caring Hands leader very casually remarked, "After dad dies....," which prompted me to ask what her dad suffers from. She said he has some sort of rare terminal disease (I don't remember what) that usually carries people off before they are 30. In fact, he is the longest living person with the disease, since another person who was long-lived, too, recently died. Her father is now 50, so the family has been living with this threat for a very long time, and, I guess, is completely resigned to it.
We got home from the meeting about 1:30, and relaxed for a while. Later, we had a veggie supper of steamed new potatoes and yellow squash, plus green tomatoes sauteed in olive oil. Veggie suppers are always a favorite with us.
Later, Hubbie and I spent our quiet hour in the usual activities, before watching TV.
Note: sadly, one of the year-old cats from mama cat's last batch of kittens crawled into the chipper vacuum tube and died. She was pregnant, so she might have thought this was a good place to have her kittens. We'd missed her for a few days, and wondered where she'd gotten off to. But the smell emanating from the garage this morning told us she was probably dead somewhere in there. Hubbie had to pull out and look behind a lot of stuff before finding her. I'm ready to be rid of some of the cats, but not that way!
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