Back to the present.

Hello, I’m back home after a month away.  My other half has made major efforts with the lawn and had a go with the device that uproots the dandelions, though like the army springing from the dragon’s teeth there are a depressingly enormous number of empty stalks all over the back garden.

Thank you for the emails and your circumspection, there were less than three hundred to deal with, for which I was grateful.  Thank you for the good wishes of Maria and her husband, my hand is now very much better.  It has obviously put itself into ‘grow’ mode and has the longest fingernails I’ve ever had, interesting scars and lots of fine black hair; it looks like the hand of a seriously effete pirate.

For the benefit of Sheila and anyone else who was wondering: a dongle is a device added to a computer to make it do something else.  In this case it’s a thing that looks like a memory stick with a USB attachment end to plug into the computer.  It lights up and looks for a wireless connection to the Internet, acting like a mobile phone.  When I’m at my mother’s there seems to be a bit of a reception blackspot but it works sufficiently well for me to post posts, surf the net and even do a bit of Internet shopping, which, at my lowest point, really helped.

I’ve been home for two days, for most of which I slept.  Although my mother now has heart troubles to add to her woes, she is sufficiently rehabilitated to enjoy trips out, though yesterday there was a panic.  The window cleaner spotted her on the dining room floor and alerted a neighbour, who went and looked and rang me.  Why my mother could not have had her fall while I was there, I cannot say.  My mother insists she was listening to the radio which was so boring she nodded off and the doctor who was summoned by the neighbour, (who is little short of an angel and sorted everything out with minimal fuss,) said there was no harm done.  The harm that was done was done to me by a friend of my mother who rang me to tell me how I should put my mother in an old folk’s home pronto.  Having spent the last nine months making arrangements for the gradual increase of care for her in her own home, I’m not about to lock my mother up like a criminal just because she sounds confused on the phone.  People with vascular dementia affecting their speech centres do sound demented from time to time.

Considering that one in four of us will experience some kind of mental health problem in the course of a year and three and a half million people over the age of 70 in the US and eight hundred thousand in the UK have dementia, some of us do need to sharpen up our attitudes.  At the very least to say: there but for the grace of God, go I.

For human beings there is a range of normal. If we are right in the middle and have two good hands, even if one is a hairy one and the ability to be happy about something today, we should give thanks and go out and tackle the dandelions with a song in our heart.

I have the feeling I will return to the subject of sanity.  Probably quite obsessively over the coming months.  Maybe with straws up my nose and my underpants on my head, who can say.  One thing I do know is that you can safeguard your mental health with a really good workout which you can get for free out in the fresh air with a weeder thingy.

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JaneLaverick.com – weedy.