B3

Mom has that friendly demeanor where if you were to step on her foot, she would tell you that she was sorry.

It’s that Southern, accommodating nature that extends to the sweet-tea boundary – you know the place. It’s the geographic boundary where the restaurants stop serving iced tea with sugar in it. Mom didn’t use foul language. That is, not until after her brain injury, she could come up with a string of “golf-words” that didn’t include “FORE, or HOLE-IN-ONE! The neurologist says those words come from our gator brain and are not a reflection of higher thought patterns. That explains a lot.

The story goes that when Dad asked Mom to marry him, she responded with, “I reckon.” to this day when she’s asked a question, she’ll respond with, “I reckon” leaving you to judge the response as lukewarm or enthusiastic so you can really tell if that’s what she wants or is just being accommodating.

Sometimes I think that mom’s loss of mental faculty is a blessing. She truly lives in the moment, unable to remember the past and incapable of imagining what’s going to happen next. I sit and watch her, wondering what she would do if we weren’t around to tell her it’s time to eat, bath or sleep.

Mom loves music. Not ALL music as she is quick to tell you which ones she wasn’t “that crazy about.” She will sit and sing along with the Reader’s Digest CD’s for hours, hitting all the words. She likes classical piano music too. She would stop eating on a Sunday morning, cock her head so her ear was lined up and say, “…oh, that’s so pretty!”

One morning, sitting on the deck, Mom strained her eyes and squinted towards Ftn. City, saying that the sky looked, “fuzzy,” unable to come up with “foggy.” She pointed to the sky and say, “there’s the moon!” I would explain to her that it was the sun, shining through the “fuzz.”

Happy Mother’s Day

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