The Home Stretch by George K. Ilsley

Author:George K. Ilsley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2020-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

What a sequence—steroids, then peanut butter, now eye drops.

There are so many of these complicated little developments and it is impossible to see them coming. Everything about aging and eldercare is totally predictable, yet the whole experience manages to completely surprise.

No wonder Dad keeps saying “What next” with such ennui, resignation, disbelief, and awe.

THE MORNING AFTER I ARRIVED on my first trip, Dad wanted to go grocery shopping. I said I had to clean first. I had to clean the fridge. “I’m not putting groceries in that fridge,” I said.

Inside the fridge was covered with dead fruit flies.

Hundreds of them.

The house was infested. I made a trap and caught a bunch of larger ones, and the fruit flies kept getting smaller and smaller—but they also kept coming. Where were they coming from?

I investigated, searching for the fruit fly factory. In the basement, I found the problem. Dad had left some turnips (I think) in the cold room in plastic grocery bags. He had probably intended to deal with the produce later but then forgot. This was October—they were not from this year. The rank brown slime in the bags appeared to have already been processed through a digestive tract. That is a polite way to say it looked exactly like shit, and smelled even worse. Putrefaction slid from the bags and seeped into wooden crates. All this disgusting mess had to be hauled out of the cold room, up out of the basement, and taken outdoors.

The house immediately felt cleaner.

The fruit fly situation improved rapidly, but the cleanup in the cold room was just beginning. What else might be sitting in there, rotting? There were rows of bottled preserves, decades old, which should never be eaten. What about in the back corner, under that pile of boxes? Oh yes, the tub of beans.

I recognized this tub. It was the perforated tub from a large old automatic washing machine that Dad had repurposed to store dried beans. He grew long rows of Jacob’s Cattle beans every year, and they were a lot of work. They had to be planted, and weeded, and then in the fall, once the plants had died and the bean shells were dry, the beans had to be harvested. All this work was done by hand. Sometimes the entire plants had to be pulled and dried indoors if the weather did not cooperate. Once the plants dried enough, indoors or out, we had discovered the easiest way to get the beans out of the shells was to hold the plants by the main stem and whack the top part of the plants against a big board. We used the headboard of the garden trailer, and the beans flew out of the dry shells and collected in the trailer bed.

More than little white-and-maroon beans collected in the trailer. Dirt and leaves and stems and weeds were all mixed with the beans.

The work, really, was just beginning.

The beans had to be cleaned. On a breezy day, you could try

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