Catch!

As the winter weather wears on and my mother loses her ability to take walks and remember how to get home, she spends a considerable amount of time indoors.  And she is restless.  She can no longer recognize any written words, and focusing on television shows for any length of time is challenging.  When I visit my parents’ house one weekend in March, I notice a mysterious, crinkled paper grocery sack has appeared in the basement. 

“What’s this?” I ask my father as I begin removing its contents. 

“It must have been something Carol did—I found it shoved under the bed this week,” he replies from the other side of the room.

My mother takes the items as I pull them from the bag.  She turns them around in her hands and nods her head, “It’s nice.”  She does this to the four VHS tapes, three DVDs (including McKenzie’s copy of The Notebook that she thought had been stolen from her dorm room three years earlier), plastic rain poncho, dream catcher key chain, soft plastic ball, paperback romance, small teddy bear I made for my father when I was in middle school, miniature billiards table, and the dozen greeting cards she received from various birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries.

“Mom, what is all this?” I ask.  She continues picking up one item only to set it down for another.  She nods her head and lifts her eyebrows, affirming, “It’s NICE.” 

I sigh and stack the items back in the bag.  My mother tries to take them out, as if having forgotten what was there.  “What’s in here?” she asks every few seconds. 

“Just some stuff” I reply, trying to keep everything organized.  She pulls out the ball and laughs as she rotates it in her hands.  I remember playing with it when my sisters and I were younger; though designed to look like a grapefruit-sized basketball, it is squishy and soft. 

“Do you want me to toss it to you?” I ask, hoping the diversion will let me finish my task.  She hands me the ball and I step back.  Very slowly, I toss her the ball.  She catches it and snickers, then throws it back to me and laughs harder. 

The distance between us increases as we send the ball back and forth across the room.  My mother catches most of the tosses, a feat that surprises my family.  The few times my mother misses the ball and it rolls across the room, she chases it down while repeating, “Oops, oops, oops” until the ball is recovered. 

She loves this game, and we lob the ball around the house during commercials on television and while waiting for dinner to cook or the mail to arrive. As the months roll on and the weather warms, we take the ball outside and my mother’s throws get a little wilder. 

She still loves to play, and when she catches the ball, she always laughs. Though never allowed to do so when we were children, my sisters and I, and my father, throw that ball around the house almost daily.