Friday, September 25, 2009

9/25 The Village

Ruth from next door brought over turkey, baked potatoes, home-made applesauce, baked acorn squash and a pumpkin pie while our dear new friend Donna concluded her stay-with-Chuck-so-Auburn-can-make-her-hair-appointment. As Donna left, a call came in from Major Karla, Chuck's colleague from the New York Salvation Army, arranging a visit. Chuck greeted her with great joy on the telephone and said, "We will be living high welcoming you." (In healing from aphasia, speech therapists tell me that a person will fish in a large pond of words for the right one and that you can tell when the person is beginning to get closer access to the precise word. Meantime, we're getting poetry, or perhaps Rastafarian.)

Shelley and CJ arrived just after Donna left expecting to visit only 15-30 minutes and Chuck suprised us all by continually asking them to stay. We went from living room, to dinner table and back to living room over the course of nearly two hours and had a grand family time.

Today we'll see Jean for a speech therapy session and new friend Kathy O'Shea (wife of Kevin who has recovered from severe TBI) is coming by for "elf" in-service. Elves fold mountains of laundry, load the dishwasher and help maintain basic order in the house, bring provisions.

(I call them elves from the old fairy tale about the Elves and the Shoemaker. Just as the shoemaker reaches his limit and doesn't believe he'll be able to survive another day, some elves appear at night while he is asleep, make a pair of shoes for him and clean up his shop. He sells the shoes and buys material for two pair. The elves return in his sleep, make two pairs, clean up; shoemaker sells the shoes to a rich man and so on. In the end, when the shoemaker has become prosperous, his wife leaves tiny clothes for the little elves who dance away with joy and never return.)

Confidential to the elves: I'm not making you any tiny clothes so you have to keep coming back.

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