The house is very quiet.

The flies have been swatted, and the two TV watchers have gone off to buy a new camping stove.

My Mother in Law is dying.

She had a stroke almost 2 weeks ago, was returned to the Home where she lives, and was sent back to the hospital almost immediately for having not enough oxygen in her blood. There is something else going wrong inside of her, and nobody knows what it is. Not me, and not the doctors.

I remember that MIL taught me the value of kindness, and of how to enjoy every day life. I remember how she raised rabbits under the avacado tree, and worms underneath the cages of rabbits.

I remember that she was raised in a time and a place where women stayed home until they got married: not her! She got a job at a laundry and moved half way across the country to California!

I remember after staying with us for a year while she recovered from a previous illness, that she announced that she had decided to move back to her home in Arkansas. "Oh, OK. When did you want to leave"? I asked. "Today", she replied. "I have made all of the arrangements", she said.

She knew that we were concerned that a woman in her 80's should not live alone, and so she had hoped to forstall any arguements. That was her way, she was never much on arguing. She would just smile kindly and  quietly do as she pleased! I am pretty sure that, as a very young woman, she gave her parents that same smile as she told them she was moving 3000 miles away to go to California......

I believe that the very elderly have a  target on their backs. She did move back to her home but she was hit by more than one con artist, until we simply insisted that she move back to live near us. She was mad at us for 6 months, but we could not think what else to do. The con men had cheated her out of most of the equity in the house, and with the added cost of a mortgage she could no longer meet her expenses.

The Great Depression, WW2, 2 marriages, 3 kids, moving from Tennessee to California to Brazil back to California again and then to Arkansas and, finally, to Kansas. And, she never seemed terribly busy: she just never stopped moving! Slow and steady describes her perfectly! The afghan she knitted last summer won the Grand Prize at the Johnson County fair: even in the Nursing home she never stopped!!!!!!!!

Her medical condition slowly grows worse: the world will be poorer when she has left it.