I grew up in the Ozark hills where the trees
blocked some of the country sunshine. The truest part of the song was how I was
happy with the simple things, and I still am.
My brothers spent time on the lake and got to know
the locals and summer crowd. I stayed close to home mostly reading, and
wandering through the woods. I could go
weeks without seeing anyone unless I went to town with Mom and Dad. In town, we
spent time with Grandma and Grandpa and a herd of cousins. On Saturday nights,
we often listened to Mom and our uncles playing music or, sometimes, we went to
the “picture show.”
I lived in the same house growing up, but Jim’s
early life was spent moving from one end of the country to the other. Most of
the time, his family lived in rural areas, but sometimes they lived in town.
Still, Jim was a country boy, through and through.
After we married, we lived in town in Manhattan
KS, Redmond OR, Versailles MO, and Sedalia MO. I was not happy at any of those
locations. When we moved to the country after living in Sedalia, I didn’t
complain (too much) about how run-down our rentals were.
One winter when we lived in a two-story house
heated by propane, the weather was so cold that the propane wouldn’t move through
the pipes into the house. Of course, every visitor we had was convinced that
the house was haunted, and I refused to think about it. Strange things happened
especially when we started moving out.
Jim and I bought some acreage from Jim’s parents,
and lived in a mobile home while we built our house. We had never had
air-conditioning, but by June, the mobile home was unbearably hot, and we
bought a window unit.
When we moved into our house, for the first time,
the outside temperature didn’t affect the inside temperature. The house was our
comfort zone, and we enjoyed the peace and quiet of country life.
Then, in the mid 1990s, things began to change. Jim’s
small memory glitches became more frequent and pronounced. He became eccentric
in the way he dressed and acted.
People often think of Alzheimer’s and other
dementias as a memory problem, but that is just one of the symptoms. Jim lost
the logical thinking skills that meant he could fix anything. One time he got
our van running with a piece of wire cut from a rundown fence. During the early
stages, I noticed that he tore things apart (the vacuum and VCR) but he
couldn’t put them together again. He just looked at the pieces lying in the
floor and walked away.
His personality changed, gradually at first, but
became more pronounced in time. He was confused and withdrawn. He was compelled
to record any shows he watched on TV and watched the same video tapes
repeatedly. Always an avid reader, he stopped reading. His collection of Louis
L’Amour books and Star Trek books collected dust.
Jim forgot simple things: how to tell left from
right, how to button his Levi’s, his birthdate, recognition of people in
photographs, and how to behave in public. He became obsessive about stuffing
folded paper towels in his shirt/jacket pockets, picking up change (even picked
up someone’s tip money at a burger place), wearing his denim jacket in 90-degree
weather, and wearing his nametag from Branson from one year to the next.
One of the saddest things that happened was when
Jim developed aphasia and became almost completely silent. I missed our
conversations so much. I talked to Jim and sometimes he seemed to understand
part of it, but I could no longer talk with Jim.
I missed the songs he sang, and eventually, he
lost the ability to play his guitar. After Jim was in long-term care, a surgeon
amputated a finger on his right hand, which had turned into an “alien limb,” a
symptom of corticobasal degeneration (CBD). Although it didn’t make any logical
sense, I was glad that it wasn’t on his left hand—his fretting hand.
With hundreds of types of dementia, symptoms vary.
The most common kind of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease. The rare type of
dementia Jim had was only diagnosed from his brain autopsy. It was important
information to have since we had two sons. Unlike early onset Alzheimer’s, CBD does
not have a clear heredity pattern.
Throughout the days that we live, we learn to
dance in the rain, and welcome the country sunshine on the warmest of days. If
we wait for the perfect time, we will miss our best moments. After all, it’s
the simple things that make us happy.
Copyright © July 2026 by L. S. Fisher
http://earlyonset.blogspot.com
#ENDALZ
