Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Circle of Life


   





I've been driving for Meals on Wheels for years now, taking a hot lunch and bag dinner to old folks....and checking up on them.  After I started, it was about three weeks in that it dawned on me that I might come upon someone who'd passed on or who was incapacitated, fallen or worse.  Yikes!  But I've told myself to grow up; deal with it.

Most of the "customers" are cute and funny.  There aren't too many complainers though many have every right to complain.  There are some who are quite chatty, capturing you with conversation as you try to escape out the door.  There's Fred, who comes bounding out of his apartment up at the Highlands, bushy eyebrows scruffing every which-way, as he jollies you along but always, for a least a year now, asks my name each time.

One of the saddest situations right now is also up at the Highlands.  Two old, old people live together, though I haven't figured out how they're related, or if they even are.  There's nothing that makes their apartment cozy or pleasant or feel like a home.  There's only a hospital bed and TV in the living room, and plastic garbage bags lining the edges of the wall.   

The same goes for the kitchen.....garbage bags full of stuff all over the place.  Are these bags filled with all of their life's treasures?  Or is it just trash they can't get to the dumpster?

Rows of bottled medications line the lower stairs; no one who lives in this apartment is going up those steps.

A man lives in the living room on his bed watching TV.  A woman, who I rarely see except through a crack in the bedroom door, is in the other room lying on her bed.  It's a heart-wrenching scene, these people who seem to be only waiting to die, surrounded by garbage bags filled with who knows what.

As I step out of this sad existence, I hear it.....shrieks and laughter from the daycare across the street.  Children's boisterous voices carried across on the wind....happy and joyful and full of life.  So beautiful.

As I'm heading to the car, I hear the dry scratching of a dead leaf blown along the pavement of the sidewalk.

At home, the wispy branches of the spirea already have little tiny tips of green, waiting, waiting to open in a few weeks.
  
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****     The spicy delicious smell of cinnamon and orange wafting up from the opened Constant Comment tea package.

****  The bright red stems of the osier dogwood on Cedar St. whipping the air against the grey of the winter day.