My Mother’s Desire To Feed Someone Is Stronger Than Dementia
The humbling power of food, duty, and love
My mother has suffered from macular degeneration-induced near-total blindness for nearly five years. She has lived in a Memory Care facility for those suffering with dementia for two years.
And every night that I’m there, she asks me, “When is Randy coming in for supper?”
My brother Randy is a bachelor farmer, and my mother made his meals for more than sixty years. She thinks she should be making them still.
My mother’s life was centered on food
My mother grew up on a farm and then became a farm wife and market gardener.
Her entire life revolved around food. Producing it, selling it, cooking it, preserving it. From a very young age she helped her dairy farmer family take care of the cows that produced the milk she drank.
She would be completely stymied by the current controversies around raw milk. She drank raw milk every day until her farmer son sold his dairy herd and she lost her supplier.
I drank raw milk too, until I went to college. One of my night-time jobs was to go out to the “milk house,” the small room at the side of the barn which held the milk cooler that…
