This and That – Mother’s Day May 14, 2017.

This Mother’s Day was spent at home. The demons of dementia are respecters of none, nor do they honor a special day set aside to honor our dear mothers. And this weekend, those demons have been very active, dashing around in my dear mother’s mind, snatching bits and pieces of her memory, jumbling them up, and throwing them back at her.

As you know, when things get bad, it’s into the family auto we go; sometimes, a ride helps. We saw the sun go down Friday afternoon, came home for a while, and then in the wee hours of Saturday morning, we were off again; this time we got to see the sun come up. Mom slept all day Saturday and most of the night. Today, Sunday, May 14th, Mom’s resting, but who knows when dementia’s demons will strike again.

It’s during her spells–as I call them–that I try to remember my mother as she was before in the snap. As a child, my dear parents were always there for me, answering my myriad questions about whatever crossed my mind at the time. We often drove to Pensacola Beach for the weekend in those gentle days gone by; Dad at the wheel of our Nash Rambler, mother riding “shotgun” and me bouncing around in the backseat in the days before seat belts.

Oftentimes, at the beach, I’d dash along the shoreline picking up shells and smooth stones that had washed ashore. A few months ago, while cleaning out our storage room, I was surprised to discover those same smooth stones in the box of seashells shown in the picture. The boxed seashells were purchased at one of those long-gone seashell shops that once lined Hwy 90 from Pensacola to Bay St. Louis.

Mother had saved the box and its seashells, along with the stones, as she did with so many of my childhood trinkets, coloring book pictures, and the like. When another spell traps Mother in its sticky web, where she does not know where she is and refers to me as “that boy who looks like my son, Andy,” I’ll think of those smooth stones and those seashells.

They will remind me of time, a happy time of childhood innocence. In a world gone mad, it’s those memories that make life happy once more. And once again, my dad, mom, and I are at the beach gathering seashells and smooth stones, not realizing that we were making memories that would–and have–lasted a lifetime.

Happy Mother’s Day to all my dear FB mothers.

Kind regards, Anthony (AMGB)