Today I asked Eleanor about her mother. I really can't say that I know much about my grandmother Albers even though I spent more time on the farm in Goodhue than my siblings. I can remember that she liked to recite poetry, that she was a school teacher from Lake City, and that her cooking skills seemed to limited to eggs and sandwiches when I visited the farm.
Eleanor was six when her sister Lorraine was born and she helped her mother care for Lorraine. I asked if that freed Lillian up to help cook and work on the farm, and my mother informed me that her mother wasn't much of a cook. When the threshers, came to harvest crops, Aunt Margaret, the real cook in the Albers family, would come to the farm and take over the cooking. Eleanor described her mother as stingy, she seemed to think the workers should be able to get by with a lot less food than Margaret prepared. It was maybe a difficult thing to be turned out of the kitchen of your own home for another person to cook. Eleanor wasn't sure that her mother was very happy as a farm wife, she had an education, and was a city girl who never was very comfortable with the isolation of the farm.
The first time her mother left Minnesota was when she went on the train to visit Eleanor at basic training in Iowa. She was part of a program to assure the mothers of nurses who had joined the Army that their daughters were being treated well. When Eleanor came home from WWII, she remembers driving her mother to a town where they had a circular bridge that went down next to the river. Lillian was terrified when Eleanor decided to drive down the bridge and informed Eleanor that she was entirely too reckless for her own good.
As I was preparing to leave, Eleanor had a question for me. "Do I think it is time for me to move to a nursing home?" Eleanor has fallen three times in the past month, and she has had a compression fracture on her hip, a badly bruised thumb, and a cut on her head that required 10 stitches. Her decision to move to a wheel chair several months ago is not helping with her strength and balance. She seems to be at risk in transferring from her wheelchair to a standing position. I didn't know how to react to the question, and was somewhat surprised that she was considering the possibility.
Shelby came with me to visit Eleanor while Joanne and I were baby sitting the girls. Shelby showed Eleanor her missing teeth, and Eleanor informed me that she had a tooth fall out yesterday. The girls posed for a picture to compare their lost teeth and great smiles. I'm thinking a trip to the Seward Dental Clinic for a check up for Eleanor. That will be after her appointment on the second to have her staples removed from the Christmas Eve trip to the emergency room. Looks like a busy first week of the New Year-- 2012.
