4/9/2022 I spent the first of three days in one room of a six-story steel and glass maze of endless bleak empty hallways and rooms. Each hallway in the maze looked exactly like every other except for a few spots of color - the indecipherable signs that pretend to tell you where you are at.
Off one of those hallways, I sat with a loving woman who hoped and prayed for her 96 year-old mother who was unconscious in a hospital bed. She waited for her to regain consciousness and did everything she could to coax her mother to take a bite of food or a drink.
It was a hostile 44 degree cloudy April day on the top of the mountain surrounded by leafless brown trees as the wind and chilling rain blew. The hospital reminded me a bit of Frankenstein's castle, sitting high above the decayed brown brick buildings of the once vital town in the river valley below. On the way home that night, by making a wrong turn and going through the old downtown area, we saw that the once happy town was vacant except for a few drug dealers that stood in the shadows of vacant buildings that were once buzzing businesses when the local miners, factory workers and their families came to shop, lunch, laugh and share the fun and gossip of the day. The soul of those skulking in theh shadows seemed to be a perfect reflection of the old empty dark buildings. Contrastingly, earlier I saw love polished by sadness, shining like a diamond in the tangled disorganized mess of the hospital room. Tubes, wires, endlessly beeping and flashing monitors and leftover dishes from the previous meal on a wheeled tray that could barely be moved in the crowded room could not hide the love.
Sixty or more years earlier back in 1953 a little premature baby girl was born. The entire hospital bill for the stay of multiple days was something on the order of 30 dollars. I saw the yellowed bill not too long ago. It was just a few years after the big war and young families homes and families. A young mother and a young grandmother were as delighted as they could be. At first they kept the tiny new baby in a shoe box. They lovingly fed the little baby and changed her, and lovingly took care of every need. Now she is my wife.
The circle turns. The baby becomes the caretaker and the caretaker has taken the opposite roll. The mother that took cared for of the little premature baby is now being cared by the sane grown girl. Time has come and gone, and the rolls have reversed, and the love is returned.
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Good hunting,
Treasureguide@comcast.net