Excitement on the humble farm? Not likely, you say, shaking your head knowingly.
Please remember that excitement is a relative thing.
Excitement for you and your young friends who whisk from pub to pub where you clink glasses is not the same as excitement on a Maine coast farm, where the poor old dears have all they can do to get from one room to another. And so it came to pass that this morning Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, had a 10 o’clock appointment with her eye doctor in Camden.
Marsha and I are in the position of many other rural seniors. I believe that her eye doctor was one of her grade-school students. For years the parents of my doctor watched me on TV. They have been feted in our home. So our visits entail socializing.
She can’t drive – mainly because she can’t get in and out of the car and I no longer feel strong enough to help her, although I might handle it in summer when we could take our time. Several friends were carefully considered before one who could help was called.
The decision was not an easy one, for the friend chosen must serve as driver, strongman, health care provider and spiritual adviser and be able to follow simple requests without question and have the patience of Job.
Getting to the car is a simple process. She rides from the house down the ramp and into the loading-area driveway on her little electric hell-wagon. I made sure last night that all was in readiness. This morning I went out, coiled up the charging cord and fastened the green door open. She wanted her green walker that she uses in the house instead of the black walker, which gets her from the library into the entry where the hell-wagon is stored.
She asked me two times to put the green walker in the library. Two times I told her that I couldn’t do it. She refuses to believe that I am not the man I once was. It entails picking up the walker and lifting it over the sink counter because we have a very small kitchen and you cannot roll a walker from the kitchen into the library. I carried her bags of cookies and her purse out to the hell-wagon.
Nothing could go wrong. Five minutes before her ride was to appear in the dooryard, she zipped down the ramp, jammed the wheel over hard right as if to go down to the driveway-loading area, plowed up a snow berm in the 1-inch-deep snow and stopped halfway down the banking.
Half-dressed – you have heard that I can only get half of my clothes on before having to rest – half-dressed and panting, even though on oxygen, I was seated on the bed watching all this through the window.
With eyes closed and the face of an eighth-grader trying to look innocent, I put my pants on over my pajamas, all the while promising myself I would neither raise my voice nor make the obvious remark about her driving as I staggered out into the cold and snow to extricate her.
She had twisted her seat to the side and was ready to get off, although how she planned to manage that is beyond me; she had no place to go and no way to get there. I gently urged her to swing her legs back onto the wagon. And then, just by leaning gently on the front end and pushing down on the backup lever, I was able to back her up onto bare ground.
I asked her to please not stop in the snow but to drive from one bare patch to another before stopping. By then her friend had arrived, right on time, just like General Lee’s messenger. I staggered back to the house and watched as she was skillfully helped into the car by strong and sinewy hands.
Much to Marsha’s distress, she had to ask her helper to fetch her green walker out of the kitchen. She would rather crawl through broken glass than ask anyone for an extra favor.
Throwing myself on the bed and sucking on oxygen, I wondered why I still hadn’t dressed or had my breakfast. I didn’t dilly-dally there long. I’ve learned that it’s best for me if I have my clothes on and the bed made before she comes home – and time passes all too quickly when you’re 86.
The humble Farmer can be heard Friday nights at 7 on WHPW (97.3 FM) and visited at:
www.thehumblefarmer.com/
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