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After some trial and error, we've found some good aides to help our mother. The first one was lovely, but my mother just wasn't ready to accept that kind of help then, saying "she just sits around watching me". The next one was sent through an agency, and she was an inept woman drenched in bad old lady perfume; my mother dubbed her the "smelly Persian". But now we've a pair of kind, strong, capable women - they know how the equipment works, they have initiative, and Trudy roasted a mean chicken last week. The only thing is, they're both quite religious. One threatened (jokingly) to whisk my sister's kids off to church when she heard they were unbaptized.

For Christmas, I'd made my mother a cross stitch. Unfortunately, she's afraid that the ladies will be offended by my handiwork, so it's spending most of the time in a drawer. I pulled it out the other day, because I needed to have a picture of it. The aides haven't quit, so I guess someone remembered to put it away again.

I've once alluded to the "family wig" - Miss M. is wearing it in this picture (along with a camisole on top of a long-sleeved shirt). Years and years ago, a single woman moved out of a house down the street, leaving behind a rich pile of garbage which the neighborhood children ransacked. There were negligees, there was a pair of brown and white patent leather platform shoes. And there was a wig. A horrible brown wig, half shag, half mullet. It has been kicking around ever since. I pulled it out the other day and plopped it on my mother's bald head, atop her headcover. Later the wig ended up on Miss M. It's a dreadful thing, that wig, but it's awfully nice to have around. You never know when it's going to come in handy.

I think my favorite moment last weekend was when the doorbell rang while I was in the laundry room collecting the bedpan. I answered the door, and found a young man selling candy. I brandished the bedpan at him and said "Not now!". He left in a hurry.

My sense of humor is peculiar, but I do believe that I've gotten to the root of it. I was looking for something in my mother's medicine cabinet, and, between a crude clay pot with failed glaze (made by me, way back when) and a bottle of Tylenol 3, I found an empty pill bottle with only one label left on it:

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Really. Clearly my tendency to collect weird bits of whimsy comes from the woman who keeps that empty pill bottle in her bathroom.