The other day I watched my Mom for an hour or so while my stepdad went to the doctor.  This is our usual thing, about once a week.  She has Alzheimer’s, but you probably wouldn’t know it if you saw her across the room. She can fake it pretty well socially with nods and smiles, so you might not figure it out right away.  She hardly speaks and she is only 71.  It’s hard to believe how much of a person you can lose to this disease in just two years.

And yes, it scares the hell out of me that I might end up this way. But I try not to think about it and to do everything I can do be healthy and active.

At any rate, Mom is generally happy to be with me and likes to look at magazines and stack papers. She is also very consumed with picking stray dirt and leaves up off my floor that my dogs have brought in.  It’s enough to give me a complex, because overall I like to think that my house is pretty clean.  But my crazy dogs love to dig and bring in leaves on a daily basis. So it saves me some sweeping when she comes over since she always has a handful of stray leaves while she walks around my house.  This makes me smile because a) it makes her happy and b) it makes my floors cleaner.

I used to always say that my mom kept her house so spotless that you could eat off of her floors.  So it must be so ingrained in her that it drives her crazy to see anything on the floor that doesn’t belong there.

When my stepdad arrived to pick her up, I saw him getting out of his car.  I saw that he had something in his hand.  He held it up for me to see down the sidewalk and I could see that he had a grin on his face. When I asked him what it was, he explained that it was one of my dinner knives.

Apparently a week or so ago when we had them over for dinner to celebrate my mom’s birthday, she put one of my dinner knives in her birthday present sack and my stepdad later found it. Kind of makes me wonder what else might be missing that I haven’t realized. It made us laugh.

So today, I am grateful for the chuckle this gave us and for the fact that my silverware set is complete again.

Thanks for reading!  What are you grateful for today?