..beginning at 6:30am with the discovery that the pink scatter rug in front of the toilet in my bathroom felt wet. Had to go get my glasses. Discovered the rug was not just wet but soaking, as was half the bathroom green carpet. Toilet area dry, moisture seemed to be emanating from the direction of the radiator on that side of the bathroom. Radiator however seemed dry. I emailed Outside Bob. No reply. I phoned him. Woke him. Bob thinks it's ice melt from the roof. But not his day to come in. So I found boots and a torch and went up to the attic. I could hear some dripping going on, no question, but couldn't see exactly where, somewhere down the eaves and anyhow nowhere near the bathroom area below. Can't figure it out. The walls are tile, the floor under the (ugly mint green) carpet is terrazzo.
So I changed into outside boots and opened the front door to have a look at the upper walls and discovered a lake had formed overnight. There had been merely a manageable puddle the day before. Now the three square yards between the house and the first stone step up to the driveway is underwater. Think Lake Superior. The ice and snow is dripping off the roof and has nowhere else to go, see, because there's still so much snow on the ground (also melting) that the water can't find it's normal run-off path down the hill. So I guess a path needs to be excavated through the drifts but as I said, not Bob's day to come in. So I am using the back garbage door to go in and out. And wellies in the bathroom.
As soon as I got to Berkshire Place, while taking off my coat I knocked Peg's ginger ale all over the floor, which is now sticky.
Soon after, Sherry, the Activities Director, made an appearance to ask if Peg wanted to come join Group Activities, Sherry who talks like a parody of an overly patient social worker talking to elderly halfwits. We declined the invite but accepted the quiz sheets so as to have a go ourselves. One is entitled "In the Neighbourhood" and has 16 questions such as "Kids made these ride-on toys or 'bugs' out of old apple boxes attached to roller skates. What were they called?", the answer being "go-carts". The other quiz is all about "Main Street, USA", answers being things like "parking meters", "fair", "parade", "town hall" and so on. Peg only managed about one third of the answers. I felt like crying. I understood, I SAW, in action, clearly, for the first time, how her brain was simply not working anymore, how the synapses weren't connecting. Scary. And not only couldn't she think of the word "hopscotch", when she finally put it together after my clues "Mama, what do you do on one foot when you jump but on one foot?" and "Ok, so what do you call those people who live in Scotland?" and so on--she couldn't even remember what the game was, although I know she played it endlessly in her youth, she's told me so, many times, and the loser, always her cousin Junior, had to then go do some penalty task that Peg set for him, such as jumping off the barn roof with bed springs tied to his feet (which I believe resulted in a broken collar bone).
Then it was Pill Time. They are now ground up in ice cream, except for two which are time-release, which are sneaked into the ice cream, and which Peg gags on. Always. Today she went further and threw them up, along with the banana and half & half she'd just had for breakfast, but it was so fast I didn't have time to grab the garbage can and so she puked into a plate of cold scrambled eggs and toast.
It's not even noon, who knows what wet delights the rest of the day will bring.
Oh. Peg's dream.
"Did I tell you I dreamed of St. Peter?"
"No, what about him?"
"Well, I bawled him out! 'What's so great about Heaven?' I said to him. 'There's all these people up here with nothing to do! Nothing to eat, no jobs, no where to sit--I think you need to figure this thing out a little better!'"
No comments:
Post a Comment