Dreaming of Streets of Gold

I was sitting with Mom K in front of the nursing home a couple of days ago, when one of the aides came out and asked how she was. Mom K reached out her hand, and told me, "She is one of the good ones."
Angela patted Mom K's hand and said, "I always want to treat them the way I hope someone will treat my own mother one day."
This struck me as a very nice way to live. Always treat others the way you hope others will treat the people you love. Treat your mother in law the way you hope your future daughter in law will treat you. What goes around, comes around.

We had Mom K over for a simple dinner last night- ham, sweet potatoes, and fresh broccoli. Rhubarb pie for dessert. Nothing fancy. I swept the floor to get the big hairballs out the door. The dogs greeted her, not minding her wheelchair at all, and she enjoyed petting them. I took Honeybun's cone off her head and watched her like a hawk to be sure she didn't reopen her dew claw scar. We played a game, but we had to move all of Mom K's pieces for her. She kept apologizing that she couldn't understand the game. She won.

During dinner, we talked about how she used to ice skate down the road several kilometers to go to school each day in the winter. She was born and raised in Germany. She told me her grandparents owned a large farm, and in the summer they had to go work and help out on the farm. As a girl, she also had to help wash the clothes by hand, hang them to dry on a clothes line strung in the attic in the winter, boil the water over an open fire to wash the clothes, for hot baths, or for dish water.
"I would have liked to live then," I said dreamily, thinking of the horses she owned, and of skating down the street to school.
"No you wouldn't have," she said, "It was very hard."

Honeybun's wound looks almost completely healed. She licks it when I take off the head cone and I am still afraid she might break it back open, but for now, I give her several hours a day cone-free. More good news: my bruised coccyx barely hurts at all. It took a decided turn for the better yesterday, and now I feel almost normal. I suppose that my melting bones are still melting, per my bone scan results, but somehow, I don't feel as worried about that right now. It seems there are so many more important things in life to fill one's head with.

Right now, I just feel grateful. Grateful for kind people who work at nursing homes and treat their charges with dignity and gentle respect, grateful for healing dew claw surgeries, and for a coccyx that doesn't ache with every move, grateful for dogs that lick and comfort old people, and grateful for visions of young girls skating to school on streets that shimmer like diamonds who will one day walk again unencumbered on streets of gold.

Revelation 21:21-27 (NIV)
The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass. [22] I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. [23] The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. [24] The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. [25] On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. [26] The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it. [27] Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.



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