My father is 77 and has had a series of major health problems in recent years, but right now I'm visiting my parents' home at Bellfountain near Monroe, and appreciate what I've seen of his improving condition.
I'm making use of my massage experience and half-formed nursing skills to assist in his rehabilitation. I've been supervising his stretching exercises and inspecting his shoes and walkers, but by far the most important thing I've been doing for him is simply walking over the grounds with him.
My parents' house sits halfway up one side of a long narrow valley, and they own the land from the roadway down to the bottom and up the opposite side to the ridgecrest, one of several similar properties in the valley. When they bought it in 1989, the opposite hillside was forested and the bottom was pasture. They undid the drainage that had been done years before and restored a pond and wetland that was much as it had been before the land was settled. Later on, they re-drained part of the wetland in order to plant more trees for the sake of income in later years, but there is still a substantial pond, and migrating birds still stop there.
When Dad was 73 and recovering from a hip replacement, he said, "I guess I'm just about able to hobble around the house now. Some people would say that's enough at 73."
"Time enough for that when you're eighty-three," I retorted. Possibly I felt the remark hit too close to home, since Kathe has also had both hips replaced, but Dad was clearly pleased with my response.
In recent years, Dad has been too limited in his mobility, or too frail, or both, to walk over his property the way he'd like to, but just recently he's been making some impressive progress.
We walk down to the barn and poke around in the workshop on the ground floor, or go up the outside stairs to go over the books in the library there. On Monday, we went on past the barn to see how the occasional worker had been handling the slash from recent tree-pruning (answer: burning some of it in a couple of small piles, leaving more for small wildlife). The bridge over the creek is currently made up of rocky stuff that I'd be hesitant to go over in a truck, but once it's been filled in with some small broken rock I'm hoping to get Dad up to the ridge on a bright Spring day so he can look down on all his land at once.
2 comments:
Dear John,
I'm not sure when they bought the Bellfountain house, but it must have been later than 1989.
After we got here, they put in the canning kitchen with no intention of leaving Lewisburg. They also improved the electrical system & put posts under the barn. Could they have done all that & still moved to Bellfountain the same year?
Let's see. Kathe and I planted trees at Bellfountain when Waldy was less than two years old, which puts it before 1990....
Guess I'll have to ask them.
Post a Comment