308 Davenport Rental Property
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Fox Pointe Apartments For Rent - East Moline, IL
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Peggy
Peggy
Posted on Mar 21, 2010 02:20:21 PM
Ron Lloyd, 2010
I sit holding her knobby arthritic hand for a long time, knowing the end is near. She is a husk of the dynamic woman she had always been, sleeping in a sling chair used for residents who can no longer sit up. In the “bird room” with us are other Ridgecrest Village retirement community residents, a number alone in their twisted slumping bodies. Others are quite alert, visiting with family, waiting for dinner or bed or pills, the next event of their daily routine in the nursing home. Glass cages hold chirping birds, their quick flitting about the cage contrasts with the Ridgecrest residents in various stages of descent toward the end. Tall glass windows hold a view of a pleasant, flowered court yard residents can seldom visit because of limited staff to watch over them. My mother stirs a bit, and I wonder what her dreams are like in the late stages of a life enclosed in dementia. She wakes for a moment, but I don’t know whether she recognizes me. Tears well up, but I stifle them. Finally, it’s time to make the trip from Iowa back to Colorado. She dies a few days later. Relatives say she found a release in my visit. She could let go. Perhaps.
In an old photograph, ten students stand squinting, the mid-afternoon September sun brightening the white clapboard siding of Centennial School. Four are Quists, Francis and Edwin in the doorway, Eugene just behind my mother Peggy at the end of the first row. She perches precariously on the edge of the stone slab, her face lit by a big smile under her bobbed black hair. Wrinkled cotton stockings rise from her high top shoes, a grayish sailor blouse drapes over her plaid skirt. She is pretty and pert, around nine years old. She seems delighted and carefree.
Peggy was born about a mile from the school. The fifth of eleven children on a western Illinois farm, she no doubt received the usual abuse from older siblings and gave unusual care to the younger ones. She scrubbed clothes, swept floors, and helped fix dinner and supper. Her father Francis said she was born with a broom in hand. Her escape, she said, was to climb to the top of those lofty pine trees on the “high hill,” as she called it, where the farmstead stood. She would watch the puffy white clouds of summer afternoons, imagining the shapes as ships and wild animals, dreaming, wondering.
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