My brother showed up and dropped off Mom. He and I had a good visit, then he had to hit the road. He and his pseudo-wife are going to Boston to watch the tall ships sail in.

Mom has slipped a lot in the last year. She doesn’t remember anything unless it is long term. We’ve told her at least twenty times that she is staying with us for a month. This morning she proudly stripped the sheets off her bed in anticipation of going home today.

It’s going to be a long month.

I’ve been involved in some of this before, so it isn’t exactly new. It just hits a little closer to home than the previous times.

She’s also like a raccoon and just getting into everything. I have to follow her around, but I’m not always sure what she will find. One example is to put distance between ammunition and firearms. There are times when I have to use the bathroom or water the garden and can’t be there every second.

Yesterday she fell into a loop of checking her call list on her phone, then obsessively calling everyone in it. Some of those calls were from a month ago. She convinced herself that someone was trying to reach her to tell her that somebody had died. I just let her look at her phone but didn’t realize the magnitude of what she was doing until relatives called to complain. I cleared her recent call log and that seems to have ended it.

As such, I may be a bit more quiet than usual for the next 30 days. I’m still here, but my hands are kind of full right now.