How Is She?

Mom was admitted to the hospital on the Monday prior to Thanksgiving.

I visited.  Once. My sis Vicki could go home for the one hour that I was there. To take a shower and bring back Little Debbie snack cakes.

Mom didn't know me but she thought I was cute. She said as much as my Sis and I were hand feeding her the Little Debbies.

"You're cute," she said. With the Most Precious Eyes and all of Heaven shining up at me.

People ask "How is she?"

I say, "She's doing better."

She is back in the nursing home. There are Alzheimer's horror stories out there about eldercare, but we think Mom is being treated well. Vicki no longer has to sleep beside her hospital bed to ensure the night nurse tries to feed her pills.

But.

How Is She?

After chopping off all the arms that reached out to me;
after boarding up all the windows and doors;

after filling all the pits with poisoned water;
after building my house on the rock of a No
inaccessible to flattery and fear;

after cutting off my tongue and eating it;
after hurling handfuls of silence and monosyllables of scorn at my loves;

after forgetting my name
and the name of my birthplace
and the name of my race;

after judging and sentencing myself
to perpetual waiting
and perpetual loneliness, I heard
against the stones of my dungeon of syllogisms

the humid, tender, insistent
onset of spring.

-Octavio Paz

But maybe-

that's Me. 

Maybe that's the answer to the question seldom asked.

"How Are You?"

Grant that I might respond:  "The humid, tender, insistent onset of spring."