In these, her late years, Vi continues to do all her housework and yard work herself, with occasional help from family or friends if they are visiting. She will also, from time to time, clean her granddaughter’s house, or a friend’s house. She cooks, gardens, and rearranges her furniture. “I was always moving things,” she says; “my second husband used to call me ‘the moving van.’” Her second husband used to clean the kitchen when she was out working, keeping the stove and oven spotless. He would clip the hedge. Now she does it herself, but thinks she does a pretty poor job of it. Her husband also planted and tended all the rose shrubs, most of which are now gone. After a full day’s work housecleaning, she will take home some plants and immediately put them in the ground. She says she likes to get her hands in the dirt.
After the working day is over, she will not only go on to tend her garden but, on certain days, leave the house after supper and spend the evening at choir practice. At a party just recently, she was one of the models in a fashion show, which required her to change into and out of eight different outfits. She admits to being tired afterward (“I was so tired, I can’t tell you; my bed said to me, ‘I’m waitin’ for you’”). But after going to bed early that night, she rose early the next day, Sunday, baked a pan full of macaroni and cheese for the church dinner, went out and worked in the yard, worked in the house, and after resting went off to the church dinner. After the dinner, because almost everyone else had left, she stayed behind to wash the dishes with a couple of friends, also elderly. They were at the church working until midnight.
Vi washes her clothes in a washing machine but hangs them to dry on a line outdoors or in the basement, as did Helen when she lived at home; neither owns a dryer, though both could afford it. Their caregivers, as they were growing up, no doubt taught them to take advantage of a “good drying day.” It should be noted that hanging clothes out and taking them in again expends considerably more energy than transferring them to a dryer, and also involves exposure to the outside air and sunlight, thus no doubt adding another small measure to Vi’s and Helen’s well-being.
Hope, by contrast, has avoided housework as much as possible all her adult life, having felt she had better things to do.
As Helen was growing up, she, like Vi, would walk considerable distances almost every day. When she lived outside of town, up on the farm, she walked to school, besides helping with housework and farm work and playing outdoors. When she moved into town, she continued to walk to school, a distance of seven or eight blocks each way. Her recreations as a teenager, besides dancing, included such group physical activities as scavenger hunts, then called “mystery hunts,” that involved roaming the town for several hours.
When she was a young mother, she would take her small sons out into the countryside onto friends’ farmland to pick berries, which she would then bake into a pie.
Helen walked wherever she needed to go. Her house was four blocks up from the main street, the last block very steep. She walked down to the shop where she worked, and walked home again. When she went into the city to work or to shop at G. Fox’s department store, she would walk to and from the train station, a distance of at least six blocks. In her later years, when she no longer went down to Main Street, she would still walk half a block up the hill and then several blocks over to her church on Sunday and, unless a friend gave her a lift, back home again.
Besides this lifetime — more than eighty years — of walking up and down the long hill, there was the work in and around the house. Like Vi, Helen, when she lived in her house, did all the housework and yard work herself. In the course of her day, it was not unusual for her to go down into the basement several times to fetch something or to hang out some wet clothes, and to climb, more than once, one flight to the second floor or two flights to the attic to find a piece of clothing or put a photograph away.
Even after her eyesight went, Helen continued to look after the house without regular help, tidying and cleaning, watering the African violets on the dining-room windowsills and the Christmas cactuses upstairs in the sunny front room. The house was still perfectly neat, though not quite as clean, since she could not see that the ruffled yellow curtains in the kitchen were becoming dingy or that there were finger marks on the woodwork by the downstairs bathroom where she rested her hand going in. She worked slowly and meticulously. She had such a habit of neatness, and was so attentive, that even with her advanced macular degeneration she would find, in tidying the house after the family had departed, a single small jigsaw puzzle piece on the porch floor. She was so patient that although she could not see more than light and shadows, she would slowly peel the potatoes for dinner, feeling for the eyes with her fingertips and digging each one out with the tip of the peeler. She would gently but firmly insist on doing the dishes herself, though she would sometimes lie down and rest first.
In the yard, she would rake the leaves and pick up the sticks that dropped from the many overhanging trees; in winter, she shoveled at least some of the snow. Family would help only with the heavier jobs: a visiting son would trim the hedge, bring the porch furniture up from the basement, put on or take off storm windows. A grandchild would sometimes help with the leaves or the sticks. If there was an unusual problem she could not handle, such as squirrels in the attic, one of her sons would help. If there was an emergency, such as a fire in the chimney, she would call her next-door neighbors.
All these various activities continued until she entered the nursing home at age ninety-one.
Whereas Vi is still active, Helen now spends the better part of her day sitting in a chair by her bed. She must deliberately seek exercise: with a nursing home aide or volunteer, or a family member, she walks all the way around the nursing home, which is laid out in the shape of a diamond surrounding an open-air courtyard. Leaning on her walker, she heads off in one direction or the other, past the residents’ rooms, most of them doubles, past the hairdressing salon (hours posted on the door), past the doors out to the courtyard, the front lobby and the stained-glass swinging doors into the chapel, a lounge with a large-screened television and a card table, a nurses’ station, another passage leading to the courtyard, the recreation room, the residents’ showers, the dining room, another nurses’ station, the staff lounge with its locked door and its snack and soda machines visible through a window, another residents’ lounge with a smaller television and a bookcase, the kitchen, and more residents’ rooms, until she reaches her own room again. Here she parks her walker, backs up to her chair, bends to grip its arms, and sinks down into it saying “Ah” with a smile, relieved that the walk is done.
Hope, too, deliberately seeks her exercise: she takes her walker out into the long hall of her apartment building with its smell of fresh plaster; and with a friend, a family member, or her paid companion by her side, she walks a set number of times to the windowed door at the far end and back to the identical windowed door at the near end, sometimes encountering a neighbor along the way. She then returns to her apartment, lies back on her old blue sleigh bed with its litter of books and magazines, papers and notebooks, purse, tray table, and ragged cloth napkin, and rests for a moment before continuing her exercise with a set number of arm and leg lifts. When she is done, she asks for her water to be refilled; she must have water in two glasses by her bedside, one half full, next to her, the other full, at arm’s length.
Present Living Situation
Helen’s house is a large one, with four floors that were once in constant use: a basement for storage and laundry, a ground floor with kitchen, dining room, two parlors, a small bathroom, and Helen’s bedroom; a second floor with another kitchen, a large front room, two bedrooms and a larger bathroom, and an attic floor containing one bedroom and one storeroom.