Miss Minnie, The Rest of the Story

Hey again, friends. While I work on my novel and wait for blogging inspiration to strike, I’m sharing some reflections I wrote back in 2010 about one of my favorite Meals on Wheels clients, Miss Minnie Jackson (not her real name.)  If you missed parts one and two, check them out here. Hang in there through part three! Her situation gets happier!

Part Three, June 2010

The last time I delivered a meal to Miss Minnie, a wheel chair blocked her front door. What was that doing there? She never used a wheel chair.
“Hey there, Miss Minnie,” I said. “It’s Becky, with Meals on Wheels.” She reached up from her bed to unlock her screen door.
“Hey.” Her voice sounded weaker than usual. “You weren’t here last time. Somebody else came.”
“Yes ma’am. My family went to the beach.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”

I opened the door. She always kept the lights off when it got hot, and it was nearly 100 degrees. When my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I tried not to shudder at the sight of her. She seemed to have shrunk. There were little red scabs all over her face. I looked down at the bugs scattering across her floor, across her sheets. Were the scabs from bug bites?

“I brought you your mail,” I said. “Maybe somebody’s sent you a check!” That’s our long running joke, that maybe one day there will be a check in her stack of bills. “Looks like you got a package.” I held up a puffy envelope.
“Oh, yeah. That’s probably my gun.”
What? “A gun?”
“Yeah.” Miss Minnie laughs, enjoying my shock. “It’s one of those tester things. For my diabetes.”
We laugh as I pull at the envelope. I say that I thought she meant a real gun, and she says no, but she’s thought about buying one with all the break-ins lately. I tell her that she’d better not do that. How would she aim? (I keep that thought to myself.)
Finally I manage to rip the package open. “Well, let’s see what you’ve got here.” Wrapped in Saran wrap is a box of toothpaste, a new toothbrush and a travel package of Kleenex. I hand it to her and tell her what it is. “There’s a card,” I say, and read it to her: For Minnie, We’re thinking of you and hope you’re doing well. We love you. Love, Your Church Family.

We look at each other for a moment, neither of us knowing what to say.
Well,” she says as I hand her the card, “isn’t that helpful.”
She looks at me and we laugh a little.
She cradles the toothpaste and toothbrush and Kleenex in her lap, laughing her weak little laugh, and I want to cry.

Part Four, August 2020

Two weeks later, Miss Minnie’s name was missing from my client list. I drove by her house since it was on my route anyway. A sign was on her door.

Condemned.

The wheelchair was still on the porch, a puddle of rainwater in the seat.

I remembered how angry she’d been with the DSS worker who threatened to force her out of her home. She must have been so scared!

A month or so later, I found out where she was. She’d been in her nursing home for a week. Was she still mad? According to the social worker, she’d thrown a big fit. They carried her out scratching and kicking.

I decided to pay her a visit at her new home. As I pulled into the parking lot, I was having second thoughts. What if the social worker told her I’d reported her situation? Would she even want to see me? The place didn’t look like much from the outside.I braced myself for the worst. Then I walked through the doors.

It was beautiful, really. There were murals on the walls. It smelled clean.
I walked through the corridors, searching for her wing. It was almost time for lunch.

Finally I found it. “I’m looking for Miss Minnie Jackson.*”
“Look behind you,” a nurse smiled.
I scanned the room. Where was she?
The nurse laughed.”You’re looking right at her!”
“Miss Minnie?” I said to the white haired woman hanging down her head.
She looked up. I hardly recognized her! The scabs had healed, her clothes were clean, and she was clean! Her fingernails were neatly trimmed. Her hair was snow white and slightly curled, like my Granny Farley’s used to be. Her face reminded me of Granny’s too, soft and smooth.

“Miss Minnie, it’s me. Becky, from Meals on Wheels.”
“Oh.” Her eyes glimmered a little.
“I’m so glad to see you. Are you doing okay?”
“I guess so,” she said, and straightened up in her chair. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you. Is that okay?”
“Well yes,” she said, as if that were a silly question. “You want to eat lunch with me?”
“I can sit with you during lunch, if you want.”
“Okay, but you’ll have to show me where it is I’m supposed to go. I get so turned around in this place.”
The nurse pointed us the way, and we went into their small dining room. It was full of other people in wheelchairs, each pulled up to tables, all in their own little worlds. A nurse was putting paper bibs on each one, calling them by name, asking how they were doing today. The lady in the corner kept calling out to no one in particular, “Sweetheart, please.”

“She’s out of her mind,” Miss Minnie said, seeing me glance at her. “I wanna say, ‘Please what?’ but she don’t know what she’s saying. She never shuts up.”

So we sat together, with another woman who smiled when I introduced myself and didn’t say another word. Miss Minnie and I talked a little, but I mainly watched her eat. She was hungry, eating nearly all her Beef Stroganoff, roll, and jello with strawberries. “I think you like it,” I teased her.
“It’s not bad.”
“It’s not bad?” I laughed. “You want me to hold the plate up so you can lick it?”
She laughed a little. “No, I can’t do that. They might stick me in exercise again, say they need to teach me to eat. They call it therapy, but it’s really exercise. You know I haven’t exercised in sixty some years? But I have to do it here.”
“Is it hard?” I asked.
“No, it’s not hard. It’s good for me, I guess. But I don’t like it much.”

“You don’t like what much?” A nurse wrapped her arms around Miss Minnie and kissed her on the cheek. “We just love Miss Minnie,” she said to me. “She’s a character.” She turned back to Minnie. “Now what don’t you like much?”
“Exercise. Therapy.”
“Yeah, well, we got to get you chewing right. We worked on popcorn this morning, didn’t we? That’s probably why you can’t eat all your noodles, today, right? Cause I stuffed you full of popcorn.”
“Maybe. Could I have some coffee please?”
“Sure honey. How do you take it?”
“One pack of sugar. That’s all.”

I wanted to cry again. But this time, for happiness!

 

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