April 12, 2023
We took in an elderly woman from the next parish hardly anyone we knew, a distant relation at best. She was blind, barely coherent, and seemed to have slipped entirely out of her own mind. It was a reckless move, yet we did it.
We live in Littleford, a modest hamlet in the Midlands. Money is scarce; we have three children Tom, Mary and Jack and from Tom we already have two grandchildren, Lily and Sam. We are simple, roughhanded folk, not much for schooling, but we have a conscience. Instead of sending the old lady to the workhouse or leaving her alone at night, we let her stay, even though her cottage sits on the far edge of the village and she can no longer look after herself.
We fetched her threadbare blankets, gave her a clean gown and a tidy kerchief, fed her from a spoon and laid her on a spare bed. On the wall we hung a woollen rug depicting a pair of stags, though she cannot see it. Life went on cabbage soup, porridge, a packet of instant noodles, tea with a spoonful of sugar. We escorted her to the loo, changed her when needed, and endured the endless babble that drifted from her thin, trembling voice.
One afternoon she whispered, Theres a thief in the shed! We hurried over and found our drunken neighbour pilfering potatoes and cabbage from the store. The coincidence was uncanny.
A week later she warned, Dont let Rinat go to town; his car will crash. Trusting her ramblings, we stopped our son Rinat from traveling with his friend. That night the friends vehicle went over the ditch and was badly damaged; had Rinat been in the car, he might not have survived.
She kept muttering about wanting a lottery ticket. My husband drove to the nearest town and bought her a single line of the National Lottery. To our astonishment the ticket hit a prize of three hundred to five hundred thousand pounds, spoken of only as a fortune in our humble tongues.
With the windfall we bought her a fresh robe, a tin of ginger biscuits, a beautiful quilt and a set of delicate beads. Though her eyes are dim, she seems to perceive the world in some other way, and we surround her with pretty things anyway. Everyone treats her with tenderness.
She still drifts in and out of memory, cant feed herself, and needs help to the bathroom, yet she smiles a gentle smile. She sits on the new quilt in her clean gown and bright kerchief, like a little doll, running the beads through her fingers and murmuring soft, kind words. She nods her head in quiet contentment.
Ive learned that even a frail, confused voice can sometimes carry a grain of truth, and that extending kindness to those we barely know can bring blessings we never imagined.
