Winter afternoons

First snow here last weekend!
Felt a little early to have the swirling white stuff outside while we are still enjoying fall colors. 
My God, I'm English and I just wrote "fall", not "autumn". Have obviously been in Japan too long.

Okaasan isn't dealing with the changing season well.
Many days she fails to get out for a walk in good weather...leaving it till 5 or 5.30 pm, usually when one of us comes home bustling noisily into the kitchen - THEN she decides to go out for a walk.
Such a waste of good, sunny weather. By 5 pm here in October it's dark and cold. A few times I've tried telephoning her mid-afternoon and reminding her to go out. It sometimes works. But, if the TV catches her attention again then she settles down to slump and doze.

So we have an 85 year old tottering around the local streets at dusk as people are hurrying home. Not downtown, she only goes to the local supermarket. Buys yet another magazine to go with the identical one at home (or identical two!), and then home she comes.

But at least she is getting out and walking a few days a week. As the weather gets worse those chances get less and our responsibility to take her somewhere for a walk increases.

Only new thing we've noticed about her recently: green tea making. She is getting confused about that very, very familiar task. Something she has done all her life, probably as the girl child in her father's home business, as a young working office woman, as a wife, as a housewife. 70 years of tea making.
First put a few shakes of tea powder in the cup, then add hot, but not boiling water and whisk or stir it.

That order of doing things is getting mixed up.
The other night she poured hot water in a tea cup. Then picked up the teabox, took a spoonful...and put it in the water tumbler. Then started to pour more hot water into the glass. :-(

Ahh!!! Okaasan...no no...not a good idea! The glass might break, it will be hot for you to pick up...um...no.....

We rescued the situation and helped her get tea powder and water in the same place.

Other days she puts the water in first. Then the powder, so of course it doesn't dissolve, and the expensive tea ($40 a box) floats in balls round and round...then she drinks a bit of the hot water and leaves it all on the table....

So. A common action she has done all her life...losing the ability little by little.

Next week is November and our big trip to Okaasan's hometown is approaching.
About a week before I will take some of her better clothes for dry cleaning, and get her to the hair salon. And then tell her we are going....

And then the adventure will begin.

Downtown Okaasan

Life is getting better for Okaasan - freedom to get out and about.

Saturday I took her downtown in the car. Released her in the city center in a familiar place. Let her roam free. Checked on her a few hours later and found she'd already safely made her way home by subway. Successful outing.

Getting her ready was the usual run-around-of-confusion...

Couldn't find her purse at all. Hunted for about 30 minutes among piles of clothes, multiple bags, newspapers and stuff. Couldn't locate it.
Finally I gave her shopping money in a different little plastic pouch. But - of course - she wasn't able to remember from minute to minute that today her money was IN this pouch...so lots of confusion.

On the drive downtown I stopped at the bank to use the ATM.
"Shall I walk from here?".
Stopped at a convenience store to buy something and get change.
"Why am I here? Shall I walk from here? Do I have any money? What did I buy here? Shall I walk from here?"
Endless...endless little checking questions. It makes me realize that increasingly Okaasan needs reassurance about the immediate world around her and what her place is in it.

At home too...the little questions we notice more and more....
"Is this tomorrow's rice?"
"Why?"
"Because we are going to eat ramen? That is the ramen bowl?"
....it was actually a ramen bowl, but being used to mix salad in on the table.....

...oh...and the Japanese tea....expensive Japanese tea that we can only buy in one shop in Sapporo. 
Okaasan is having a harder and harder time making the tea for herself. Almost every day now there are cups of water/cups of tea powder/cold water/forgotten tea around the kitchen.
She probably drinks only 50% of the tea we buy for her. The rest is wasted and thrown away.

The correct tea making order: heat water/put powder in cup/wait/put hot water on powder/whisk with bamboo whisk/wait/drink - all of that is getting more and more confusing for Okaasan.
It's a basic series of actions she has seen/done all her life. Now, getting it done in the correct order is getting harder.

But!
Spring is a-coming and today will be the last day helper visit day for this winter season (must leave note about the missing/substitute purse). From now on we hope Okaasan can go out and walk on her own. Have freeeeeeedom. And get more mentally alert.

SPRING!!!!