Country Sunshine

 

One of the songs I used to sing at the nursing homes was “Country Sunshine.” This song is in many ways the story of my life. As one of my friends used to say, “You can take the girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl.”

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

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