Adaptation

I have no idea who said it, but somebody did.  “The job of a writer is not to chronicle gigantic events - but to make small ones interesting.”  I’d like to believe it is true.  The art, of course, is to make something small...well...seem interesting.  

Someone else supposedly said, “Write what you know.”  And yet another person allegedly stated, “Always write to your audience - have a conversation with them.”  

So, let’s see here.  Something small. Something I know about.  And, something that my audience would like to hear.  That last one is a little tricky.  Hopefully, anyone reading this will want to keep reading.

Each spring and fall, I make a snowbird trip with my parents.  Basically, I help Dad get Mom to and from Wisconsin and Florida.  Mom is living in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s Disease and therefore is helpless by every definition of the word.  Chewing and swallowing are really about all that she is able to do for herself.  Dad is her twenty-four-seven caregiver.  Traveling fifteen hundred miles with her is more than he would be able to handle by himself.  My brother and I feel it is important for him to continue to spend the winters in Florida, away from the harsh Wisconsin weather, like they’ve been doing since 1983.  

Therefore, Dad and I load Mom into a bed of sorts in their van and two and a half days later arrive at their small trailer in Florida.  The twenty-four hours we spend in the van are definitely material for a story on its own, however I’ll leave most details of that adventure up to your imagination.   

Closing-up the Wisconsin house, draining all its water pipes and then squirting antifreeze into them is perhaps another story that could be told in detail, too.  Equally challenging is opening the trailer in Florida whose only occupants between the end of April and first of November is bugs - hundreds of them.  But I am going to focus on what happens after I get the trailer clean enough for us to eat and sleep in it.  

Actually, the story begins back home in California.  It is in my office that I plan what will happen after I’ve done the preliminary cleaning of the trailer.  It involves a menu and creating a shopping list.  I’ve been doing these trips since 2005.  Therefore I feel as if I have the routine down to a science where I simply follow a plan.  In the fall of 2005, I didn’t have an elaborate plan yet and it was on that trip that Mom had two seizures in the same day between Kentucky and Georgia.  Little did we know that morning when she walked with us out to the van, that she would never walk again.  Every detail of any plan is subject to change.  That’s life in the real world.  Mom was still talking at that point and at times could follow and participate in a conversation.   But everything changed quickly on that, my first snowbird, trip.  That, too, could be a story, but for this one, is only backstory information.

For thirty years I worked in several different positions in nursing homes, hospitals, and assisted living communities.  It is ironic that eventually when I became a licensed administrator it was in communities exclusive for elders living with Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias.  Again, there are thirty years of stand alone stories to be told.  Maybe even a book.  The most interesting stories are the ones that were unexpected of course.   Surprises do make life interesting.  Or, challenging, to say the least.

Perhaps yet another detail that could be mentioned, is the permanent-wave and hair cut day.  That is the day after I fly, which is the day before we leave on the road trip in either direction.  It has evolved over the years, becoming more and more difficult as Mom has declined.  We now lift her onto the shower bench for the three minute clear water rinse, the neutralizer application, the ten minute wait, the removal of the rollers and the final rinse.  In the meantime I’ve been practically standing on my head for the initial roll up that ends twenty-five minutes before the hoist into the shower and when the permanent solution is applied.  But, that too is not the focus of this story.

No, this story is about cooking and freezing enough meals to last them for six months.  Typically it is too hot inside the trailer to do the cooking, so I make use of an electric dutch oven and a deep-dish electric fry-pan.  I set up one on a table in the screen room which is attached to the little trailer and the other on a folding table outside on the stoop - next to the clothes line.  Of course the kitchen itself is inside the trailer, so all day long and I am up and down, in and out, going to the water source as needed.  I get the job accomplished over two to three days.  They stay in both Florida and Wisconsin for six-months so that means between one hundred seventy and one hundred and eighty days in each place.  

The meals I cook need to freeze well.  And, most importantly they need to be meals that Mom can eat.  As her abilities have declined, I’ve adapted.  I still don’t ever use recipe measurements, but my shopping list indicates all dishes that that item will be used in.  Therefore I know to buy at least three whole chickens because I need chicken in five different dishes, for example.  I bake all three chickens at once and then after pulling them apart and dicing their meat, I divide them into five zippered bags and toss them into the refrigerator.   This fall, I needed ground beef in three dishes, so I purchased about five pounds, fried it up and put three bags of equal portions away to be pulled out when needed.  They will eat each dish twelve times over the course of six months.

These days, every meal is a mock of something else.  Lasagna Marinara Casserole, for example, has the same flavors as a classic lasagna.  However, its pasta is elbow macaroni and its ingredients have been diced to minute pieces.  Fortunately Dad will eat anything.  Every dish is tasty, but the texture is adapted for Mom.  

“What did you eat for dinner this noon?” is a typical question I’ll ask Dad during a phone conversation.  Nine times out of ten, he’ll have to go look at the label on the empty container.  “Baked Potato Casserole, maybe?”  I’ll prompt.

“Nope.  It say’s, Chicken Stroganoff Casserole.”

“How did Mom do with that?”
“Oh she eats that one really good.  That seems to be one of her favorites.”

“Do you like that one?”

“Sure.”

Of course there are some items that I’ve had to drop from my menu.

“I can’t get Ma to eat that Strata Casserole.  I don’t think she likes it.”

“Did you try an alternative to see if it is the strata or that she just wouldn’t open her mouth today?”

“Yeah, I gave her some yogurt instead and she ate that good.”

“It will be interesting in a couple of weeks when you try strata again to see if she eats it then.”

One thing I should mention is that it often takes a full hour to feed Mom one meal.  Getting more than a half-teaspoon of something into her mouth is tricky.  The exception is something sweet.  The other day I was feeding her lemon pudding cake with a sugary glaze and  she opened her mouth wide enough for me to shove pieces nearly the size of half a marshmallow in at at time.   

Their breakfast meal is the same every day of the week.  By choice, Dad offers no variety to what either of them eat, but the main entree, if you can call it that, for Mom’s breakfast is a can of Ensure.  He also feeds her a mashed banana, a slice of cinnamon raisin bread and a glass of orange juice.   He, on the other hand, has a slice of toasted whole wheat topped with peanut butter and raspberry freezer-jam (made from their bushes in Wisconsin) along with a banana and a glass of orange juice.  Dad learned how to make freezer jam when Mom’s dementia was preventing her from doing it alone, and then of course he took over completely and now does it solo. 

The meal that they call supper, the one he feeds her around four o’clock in the afternoon, is light.  It may be oatmeal, or yogurt but almost always ends with a dish of ice cream and a cookie.  Once in a while, he’ll scramble an egg or make pancakes for them.  He was very proud of himself the first time he fixed scrambled eggs.  He called me to tell me he found the recipe in the Betty Crocker cookbook.  

When I began this story, I had every intention of it being about the process of cooking and freezing one hundred and fifty meals.  But, like most conversations I have, it drifted away from my plan.  And it really is, in a nutshell, what life is all about.  Someone has said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans.”  

Living really is about adapting to change.  I would not be able to accomplish what I set out to do on these snowbird trips without a plan.  However, what is key is being willing to adapt and putting plan B or C or D or even E or F into action at a moment’s notice.  I remember one year dropping the bottle of black pepper into a potato soup I was making and freezing for my folks.  It was still pretty strong, but edible after I basically doubled every other ingredient.  When labeling each container for the freezer, I simply wrote:  Peppery Potato Soup.  Adaptation.

 

  

Proverbs 3: 5-6  Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding, and He will direct your path.