Legacy
Legacy
Please note: this post is 139 months old and The Cares Family is no longer operational. This post is shared for information only
In the first two blog posts about his experience getting to know Mitzi through NLC's Love Your Neighbour programme, vounteer Mike wrote about his expectations, and trepidations, of getting involved. In the third edition, he tells us a little more about Mitzi, and the many stories she shares...
BY MIKE NILES
The house is covered with imagery of animals. Things hang from lampshades, statuettes cover flat surfaces and unnerving framed artist impressions give me evil glances from the walls. Cats and butterflies are particularly prominent. I arrived at Mitzi’s one evening after work and I really wasn’t in the mood. The previous visit had been quite difficult as it had been a tough week with her illness. The weather was getting colder and Mitzi’s neuralgia was in overdrive. A slight draft or failure to properly protect against the weather resulted in nerve pain in her head, I guess a bit like a migraine. To counter this, Mitzi’s home is like a furnace. The heating is so high that I just sit there, sweating through my shirt, trying to pay attention while tactically scooping the sweat off my forehead.
Animals are prominent in her stories too. For example, the one about Bernice the battery hen. Mitzi’s friend runs a farm where he cares for a hen that is paralyzed from the neck down. Bernice needs help to survive, as you can imagine, so Mitzi’s farmer-friend puts a form of nappy on the hen and refreshes this regularly, relocates her through the day so she doesn’t get bored of the same view and washes and blow-dries the hen's feathers every single day to make sure she’s clean and happy. Mitzi caught me almost choking with laughter when she first told me this. I was convinced that Mitzi’s farmer friend was a few eggs short of a basket.
I turned up one week and there was a pile of cards waiting for me on the swivel seat I’d claimed as mine on my visits. I’d say 90% of them had some kind of animal on the front, so clearly they were from people who knew Mitzi’s passion for animals. They were all birthday cards and I was invited to read the messages inside. Mitzi had herself led me to believe she was a bit of a lone ranger but these cards were brimming with compliments and genuine affection from friends around the world. It was the first time I felt Mitzi trusted me as she’d decided to share some quite personal notes.
Mitzi has provided me with some bizarre stories, some of which I’ll be sharing here on this blog, but the one about Bernice made me laugh a lot. Thinking back, Mitzi likes this story because she genuinely cares about animals. More than humans she recently told me. Bernice is being kept alive by someone who cares so much about animals, they are willing to go to such measures to keep one alive. I don’t laugh at this story anymore. Now, it just makes me smile...
Read previous entries in Mike's blog by clicking the links below, and stay posted for the next installment...
1 - Time for Plan B
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