On the Edge

It happened again and so I'm going to write about it. I forget who and where...which is a bit ironic...but someone recently said to me: I remember when you put that note up on your mother's wall...
   My mother suffered from a gentle dementia...she always knew the date....she always knew who was prime minister...she always claimed to be fifty which I found unfair...I said: No mother...I'm older than fifty so you can't be fifty...I'm your daughter.
    She would just laugh...
    It seemed so important to me...

    The one aspect of her dementia which caused her dismay was that she every now and then would look for her mother...granny...
     And so I put a note up on her wall...above the telephone...Granny is dead.
That was all she needed...
But when she had visitors, she would take the note down - it wasn't seeming...seemingly...
How astonishing the human mind is.

A friend told me of his mother who fretted about what had happened to her house. And so he took a lesson from me and put up a note: The house  is sold...
But he couldn't resist homage to the original: And granny is dead.

When he next went to visit his mother, he asked if the note worked.
His mother said: Oh yes...when I worry I just look at the note...and I remember that the house is sold...
My friend smiled but before he could on, his mother continued: But I didn't know granny was dead!

One year the income tax people came after my mother for not declaring that she was living with someone. I wasn't impressed. I had already found the culprit. I had found the registration paper for the Referendum. My mother had convinced the people who came around that she lived with my grandmother. They even had the date of my grandmother's birth...1883. That would have made my grandmother 113 at the time of the referendum...no one bothered to count.

I went to the government offices and the woman in charge peered at me over her computer as I gave her my grandmother's name...and sure enough, she had the grace to blush! They were trying to catch my mother out for harbouring a 113 year-old tenant.

Note: This picture? It's not an airplane...it's a dragonfly!!!