The Secret Of Youth

    Last Thursday Tom and I drove 10 hours from Columbus to Seaford, Delaware, to visit my 95-year-old mother. 
   My mom recently took a fall from which she is now  recovering in a rehab center where she is, in her usual way, making the best of adversity.

    In the two weeks she's been at the center my mom has  managed to make friends with her room mate,  the staff, and everyone on her floor.  She rolls down the hallway  greeting the residents  and caressing the hands of those who can't speak.  Some put out  their hand out for her to take as she passes by.  She wheels into the dining room and introduces me to her friends.  She's the person whose table everybody wants to sit at, though she now  has her Posse with whom she usually sits at meals.
    I heard my mother, herself a nurse, in a physical therapy session telling the therapist of her disapproval of the staff asking the patients their level of pain before administering pain meds.  "You have to give the patient the meds an hour before  the typical onset time of pain,"  she said, "and not wait until they're already at 7 or  8."   One of the administrators turned to me and said to me with a wink, "Oh, these nurses are the worst patients!"
    But the staff member was joking.
    In fact I was informed what a good patient my mother has been at her physical therapy, compliant, hard-working, pushing herself to do whatever she's asked.  She's anxious to walk again.

   One day during my stay at my mother's house  I was perusing her living room shelf,

    ...where I found some old photograph albums which I brought along  on my next visit.

    Among the albums I'd found one dating back to my mother's time as an army nurse in Puerto Rico during World War II.

    She still remembers the names of some of her fellow medical personnel.

    That's my mom in the photos below.

   The best moment with the photo albums came while we were looking through some photos of a cruise my parents took about 20 years ago.  My mom pointed to a photo of herself wearing a wide-brimmed purple hat decorated with big pink and blue paper roses. 

    
    She could barely stop laughing enough to explain that one day one of the activities for the ladies on board was a hat-decorating contest.   Everyone was given a hat and some decorating supplies, but my mom had her own vision.  She snuck off to the ladies' lounge and pilfered a couple handfuls of the pearly-pink-and-blue-wrapped sanitary napkins.  Actually she left the pads and took only the wrappings which she fashioned into lovely paper roses then glued to her hat.
    My mom won the contest.
    But, she said, someone swiped the hat.  I told her I bet it was the maintenance staff who wanted the wrappings back for the sanitary napkins.
    Nothing like a good laugh to keep you young.