celebrating - 91st birthday

There is a little lady here who has spent most of her life in the USA, now in her old age she is back in her hometown in a rest home

The poor little lady is alone and lonely. She phones my coworker frequently to bemoan her situation. Nobody comes to visit, she doesn't know anyone here anymore and so on. Today is her 91st birthday, so "someone" bought her a potted plant - a Hortensia if you know them.

We walk down the slippery hill from where we stay when we're in town, carrying Hortense in a plastic shopping bag between us. When we arrived to the door of her little apartment there's no answer, from inside the phone is ringing non-stop. Some of us are prone to take a running start in leaps to conclusions, so the nurses were expedited to open the place up, to murmurs of "oh we should have made this visit yesterday after all"

A nurse lady briskly and efficiently scanned the place:

nope, she's not here.

can we leave Hortense here?

yep no problem.

That's taken care of; Ms, Nurse locks the door, and I head down the hall to avoid the inevitable:

are you sure she's not in there?

Huh?

Well, did you check in the bathroom?

I quicken my pace, but Ms. Nurselady, who gets paid for stuff like this, kindly, patiently, in good humor jingles her keys around and opens the door again to look one more time.

By now I'm almost too far down the hall to be polite if anyone wants to catch up and walk with me, so I stop to study a reproduction of a very cool picture, “Brudeferd i Hardanger”. We've already walked down here once today, but now we're doing it again trying to find a little 91 year old lady who's mysteriously disappeared in the rest home.

Oh she's probably playing bingo Ms. Nurse tells us, so we head down to the Bingo Basement, and as we near the basement I see a little figure of a lady walking along pushing her wheeled walker.

I call out her name, she's not deaf, so she turns around to look, trouble is she's nearly blind, so can't really see me and turns away to keep going. We catch up with her at the elevator, and are joyfully received. Inside the elevator we stand and look at each other, and then we look at the floor, as people do in elevators, the door closes, but we don't go anywhere. I decide it's time to push a button, I push “2” for second floor. Our little old lady acquaintance steps into her role as hostess, and scathingly tells me I've pushed the wrong button and gives me a long hard and sharp look. I pretend not to notice, but being thin skinned and nearly 50, the side of my face begins to burn and I have to concentrate to keep it from twisting into an evil grimace.

We slowly walk back down the corridor and finally arrive to her little place again, inside she sees flowers from a relative... "oh no what am I going to do with these? I can't be watering these...I'll just have to take them down to the sitting room.” I comment that she has several flower pots in the windowsill, “oh yeah, they're all synthetic” (I was wondering, but didn't want to be so rude as to go and try to break off a leaf.) In spite of this she seemed pleased to see Hortense, the plant we had with us.

We started to visit with her, and were interrupted by a few lengthy phone calls, nephews calling to wish auntie happy birthday. I had time to type over half of this during one of the calls until my sensible cohort suggested we might as well leave!

We did leave, but after a cup of tea...I think she enjoyed her birthday in spite of herself!

Lurking around in the resthome

I'm going to try and be nimble with words and think on my seat to give you a flavor of life at "Hegratun"
We are just temporary where ever we are so now we rent an unused wing of this old folks home. It's a very interesting experience for me in many ways. The residents are very friendly and kind, and a few of them are eager to chat with us. Of course they are lonely, but there is a prevailing spirit of good cheer.
My cohort volunteers to go in after meals and help with dishes. She only does this when we are here, of course we have lots going on, so it doesn't work for her to do that every day.
The community is good at coming in and looking after the residents in different ways. A month or so ago the kindergarten was here and took the place by storm.
This week a choir came to sing for the seniors. They were a fun group of retired folk who just sing, they don't do parts, they just belt it out whether they can sing or not! Their leader, a man with eleven siblings, told us that he and his younger brother (also a member of the choir) were told not to sing at school because: "you can't sing, so you just sing inside yourself" Well now they have overcome this childhood repression and are making up for lost time! (My dad, who belongs to that same generation has had the same treatment, but he sings too now!)
We all sang several songs together then we had a beautiful coffee and Norwegian open faced sandwich party. It was really touching to see how pleased the seniors were and how much they enjoyed the treats. And I loved the singing. There is something about the Norwegian language that moves a primitive chord in me. I can't explain it, but that's just how it is.
If you were once Amish you might understand.
Oh, I thought I was done, just one more thing:
The knitting cafe meets here every second week. This is also nice for the seniors who are here, because they mix with others. Today was a knitting cafe day. We are invited too, so today I was sitting there furiously knitting away, then I discovered I had gone too far and had to unravel a bunch. "So do I unravel it all here now in front of all these ladies who are pros?...or do I put it away and sit here and twiddle my thumbs?" "Aw what the rip, just go for it" So then I had a lap full or unraveled yarn, but no big deal.
Afterwards we were invited in for dinner, we had "pinne kjøt" which is traditional Christmas food. It's cured lamb ribs, we ate it every Christmas eve when I was growing up. In the picture you see the mashed rutabaga, it's the orange stuff. It was truly delicious!

Life in the retirement home

Kindergaten and the new Gym

The place where we are staying now organizes outings for the residents, and Inger Johanna was excited about going along last week. I didn't really feel like going, was only just getting over a cold and we had a class to teach in the evening. But I relented and went along. And I'm really glad I did, because it was so neat to see all the kindergartners! They meet us at the door, all friendly and welcoming, so I didn't feel weird or strange because of not knowing anyone. I like the way little children are exposed to senior citizens, and that the seniors get to be with children.
The gym was fantastic, and I loved watching the children running with balls and playing with hula hoops and climbing on the bars! There were goal lines in all bright and magical colors on the floor and the children were dressed in bright colors so it was like watching a prism's beams flitting around the floor.
An elderly man in a wheelchair buzzed around the whole time taking pictures, I hope you'll click here and look at them! You'll see Inger J in two pictures and me in one of them. You can also see the kids climbing up the side of the walls!
After we had a tour of the gym we went in to the kindergartner's room and were served coffee and tea, the kids sang for us, and of course we applauded, then we sang a few childrens songs to them and it was really cute how they clapped for us.