Ice

Two weeks ago my mother went out the back door to take the compost to the bin, the way she has every morning for forty years, and the second step down was ice under a skin of snow. She put her right hand out, as everyone does, and broke her wrist.

She called me herself, from the emergency room, with her arm in a temporary splint, and gave me the facts in the order of their importance, like a reference librarian. She had fallen. She had broken her wrist. It was not her hip. The neighbor had driven her. She had already eaten. She did not need me to come. I was on a plane two days later.

I was home for a week. Duluth in February is about what you'd imagine. The inside of my nose froze on the walk from the car to the house the first night, and I'd forgotten that, and I was absurdly pleased to remember. I shoveled. I salted the steps, all of them, twice a day, while she supervised from the kitchen window with her arm in a sling, in case I did it wrong. I drove her to the orthopedist, who was younger than me, and she asked him where he'd trained in a tone that made him tell her.

What stays with me from the week is her indignation. She wasn't frightened, or if she was, it was well hidden under how offended she was. She has salted those steps since before I was born. She knows that step. The step, in her account, had behaved unforgivably. On the third day she told me, very calmly, that she intended to outlive it.

I did the cooking, the dishes, the mail, the trash, and the buttons, which she hated most. She let me do all of it except cut her food. She cut her own food with the side of her fork, slowly, for a week, rather than let me do it, and I learned to look at something else while she did.

She has a cast now, and six weeks of it to go, and then therapy. She's fine. She'd want me to say that first, so I'll say it last, which she'll notice.

How do you help someone who'd much rather you didn't?