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ThePorchlightJournal

Plain notes on breathing easy
and looking after the ones we love

Kept by Sophia Williams
North Carolina

From the porch

Pull up a chair

This is a small handbook about breathing easy, about keeping your independence as the years go, and about the people who sit up at night listening. I'm Sophia Williams. I'm 57, I live in North Carolina, and I am not a doctor.

Kept by Sophia Williams, North Carolina

Most mornings I'm out on the porch before the house wakes up. Two cups on the rail, one for me and one for my husband when he comes out, and the yard still wet from overnight. That first hour is when I do my thinking, and this journal is mostly made out of it.

For about twenty years I worked as an in home caregiver. I let myself into other people's houses at seven in the morning, sometimes with a key from under a flowerpot, and I helped somebody sit up, get washed, get a little breakfast down, and get started on the day. Different towns, different kitchens, and always that same quiet first hour.

Two things stayed with me from all those years, and they are the reason there is a journal here at all.

The first one is about my own mama. She had a remedy for everything and never wrote a single one of them down, she kept the whole of it in her head, and one winter afternoon I came in the back door and found her standing in her own kitchen with both hands on the counter, looking at the flour and the butter like they belonged to somebody else. She had made that pie every Thanksgiving of my life without once looking at a recipe. She said it would come to her in a minute. I said it surely would, mama, and I stood there with her until it did.

The second one is about the other person in the room. In nearly every house I ever worked in, there was somebody standing in the doorway. A wife. A grown daughter. A husband who hadn't slept properly in two years. They would walk me out to my car to say the thing they would not say inside that house, and it was always some version of the same sentence. I'm so tired, and I don't know what else to do.

Nobody ever asks that person how she is holding up. So I do.

That is what you'll find in here. Plain notes, the kind you would get over the fence from a neighbor who has seen a few things. What I noticed. What seemed to help. What is worth a phone call to your own doctor, because nothing I write here ever replaces the person who knows the history and can put a hand on your back.

I'm no doctor, honey, and nothing I write here is written to sell you something. Pull up a chair.

Contents

  1. No. 0 Who keeps this journal About Twenty years of letting myself into other people's houses, and a daddy who never could quit and never once complained. Who I am, who I am not, and why I started writing any of this down.
  2. No. 1 Breathing, and the years Health Getting winded is not the same thing as getting old. Here is what I learned to notice on those morning visits, and what people will hide from their own families for years. It ends with the plain question that is worth a call to the doctor.
  3. No. 2 Catching your breath Health What to do in the minutes when the breath goes short. The slow way of breathing out that the American Lung Association teaches, with their own two minute film, where to sit while you do it, and where the line sits between a bad few minutes and a phone call.
  4. No. 3 The air in a house At Home Every house has a smell, and the people living in it stopped noticing theirs years ago. What the first hour of the morning tells you, what a little plain housekeeping is actually worth, and the things I would not bother with.
  5. No. 4 For the one doing the caring Caregiving Nobody ever asks the wife how she is holding up. This one is for her, and for the daughter, and for the husband who has not slept properly in two years. On the hardest chair in the house, and on letting somebody help you.
  6. No. 5 What gets harder quietly Daily Life The mailbox. The last three steps. One bag of groceries instead of two. The things people give up without ever announcing it, and how to keep a plain record so you have something real to show at the next appointment.
  7. No. 6 When a name won't come Health Everybody loses a name now and then. What the ordinary kind of forgetting looks like, with the National Institute on Aging's own short film on where the line sits, the small repeating things families tend to notice first, and how to ask after it without turning your own kitchen into a test.