Gratitude

Deep and grateful thanks to all of you who sent wishes, prayers, and hugs. I am humbled but cheered by your concern. I am still in the hospital, with all signs and symptoms steadily improving, but I will be here another night. The cardiologist told me this morning I could go home only if I took the monitor and IV with me. Guess I’ll stay.

I have been worried about Sophie, who feels abandoned. When a friend went by the cottage to pick up some things for me, she said glared at her as if to say, “You’re not my mother. What have you done with my mother?” She was comforted by having Megan all night, and this evening Jacob took her in the main house for a while. But in the picture above, she still looks a little cautious.

Meanwhile, I’ve been treated to the best of medical care and can’t help thinking back to the fifties when I worked in what was then a state-of-the-art hospital. Yesterday, a technician did a scan of my lungs (no, not an x-ray), and told me it would go to Dallas to be read. Everything is digital and electronic I remember food service when there was one choice for dinner, and every patient was served around five. Now, there’s a menu, and you can order it twelve hours a day.

I had been thinking before all this happened about the goodness of people Some wonderful stories are coming out of Houston and the surrounding area. The owner who opened his furniture stores to evacuees, the marooned bakers who kept making pan dulce for twenty-four hours and used 4400 lbs of flour—the bread went to various shelters; the people who have welcomed evacuated horses—and their owners—to their ranches.

I’ve personally been touched by kindness the last twenty-four hours. When there is so much unfortunate focus on race in this country, I couldn’t help but reflect my caretakers have included two of apparent Arab descent, two of Asian background, and a handful each of Anglo and African American. There was no differentiation—they all work together in harmony and they were uniformly kind and caring to me. I have seen nothing but the best of Texans.