Putin Must Be Terrified

I visited Geneva today (am going every day until her daughters take her to St. Louis Thursday for her surgery Friday.) Her sister Karen was there, with her husband giving the grounds and equipment the look-see. He greeted Jake and I in the driveway and told me his own ferocious dog was in the house, but I already knew that because of the snarling and barking of a tiny little terrier weighing no more than ten pounds.

After I sat Jake down on the porch, settling him onto the rug Geneva said he could sit on when he visits, I went in and told the snarling little hound she’d frightened my poor doggie half to death. Proud of herself, she jumped onto Karen’s lap and Geneva offered me a cup of hot water for tea or cocoa.

I picked a lovely salted caramel flavored cocoa. I heard it doesn’t count if a beloved neighbor makes it for you.

I asked Geneva if she was in any pain. She said she wasn’t in pain, but her vision was doing strange things. In one eye, the right eye, she sees squiggly shapes sometimes… perhaps a telephone pole suddenly seems to wiggle, she said.

In her left eye, it is as if the scene is drifting back and forth. I knew exactly what she meant… it was exactly the effect the pressure on my optic nerve had on me when I was hydrocephalic suddenly at age 42. I was also suffering from what is called sunsetting. I am going to ask her daughter if her mother has been checked for hydrocephalus, because I remember my neurosurgeon telling me that many elderly people are declared senile when they are actually just acquiring csp in their heads, putting pressure on various parts of their brains.

It is worth asking.

Anyway, she said she is not hurting and she is also not afraid. She said “the world ain’t never gonna be the same, Martha. I’m ready to go to heaven and see the Lord and Bob again.”