Ten-Finger Exercises

My mother would never have done that.

Quickly, before I left for work, I stitched up the seam of a pair of my husband's casual pants. With a rip in the seam of the crotch, they had become more than casual. I don't know if he will wear them again or not. They'll be fine for yard work, or washing the car, if I could find a place to keep them where he'd find them for that kind of wear but not to wear to work.

I thought I had navy blue thread on my bobbin, but when I was done with the job I saw it was bright blue. I didn't stop and rip it out. It didn't show from the outside. Still, I know my mother would never have left it like that.

She's been gone a year and a half now, and I miss her daily. Not the woman she was for the last six or seven years of her life, no, I don't miss that woman. She was a lost soul, forgetting how to carry on a conversation, tormented by the loss of her perfect internal compass that had deserted her along with so much of her mind. Day after day I'd find her on the telephone, trying to talk an operator into getting her a phone number for a listing that no longer existed, her mother and father. Her father had lived to 106 yrs and had died twenty years before, and here she was trying to cajole the number out of the long distance operator. So, so sad.

Off I need to go, to visit a woman in a nursing home and then to the Y for water aerobics, then on to work.