Mary K

On the last day of our vacation in Maine we went to visit my grandmother, Mary K, at St. Joseph's nursing home in Portland. I had picked up some flowers from Shaws with some chartreuse carnations which happpened to match her green suit.

At first she didn't want to visit with us because she told us she always sits next to Jimmy. I wasn't sure who that was but was really happy she had such a close friend there. Then she seemed to focus on us and marveled over how much my son, who she said was handsome, had grown. My 10 year old managed to make herself invisible. 

The nursing home is too stuffy - outside I was nearly high off the aroma of this little glenn of pine trees they have in front of the home, but inside that place there was no air at all. I wonder if it would be terribly hard for them to let a little more fresh air in there. We sat by a window with my grandmother which my mother cranked open and some of the sweetest air I've ever breathed wafted in which made me so happy I nearly cried because it didn't smell too good  in there. People would visit their elders more if they could stand the smell of those places.

My aunt says my grandmother is not always lucid. For instance, once when she went in, my grandmother asked if she liked how she had redecorated the place. Sometimes being semi-lucid is just the thing to get you through the day, I think. If you disagree, please come discuss it with me when I get back to Brooklyn. You'll find me at the Lefferts house growing flax.  When I get home, I'm moving in there. And my grandmother's going to redecorate, she was always a great decorator with refined taste and considerable hand-crafting skill. But we'll just change things a little, what we can get away with before some historic preservation committee hunts us down.