Tulips and Taste

I cut some tulips the other day and brought them in so Mary could see them. The first fall I was here I went a bit crazy planting bulbs. Rather stupidly I planted the tulips next to the bottom of the front steps, which is a place that Mary can’t see very easily. (The funny thing is that I planted red tulips interspersed with yellow tulips and now we’ve got red tulips with black outlined with yellow in the center and a bit of yellow tine and streaking to the petals. Also, sometimes there are pink tulips. Very odd. And the daffodils all moved and are now clumped together. They were originally interspersed with the tulips.) Anyway, Mary was sitting there looking at these tulips today and asked me, “Honey, what are those flowers called?” I told her they started with a “t” and ended with a “p”, but that didn’t help. Then I asked her if they were roses? No. Daffodils? No. So on. I finally told her they were tulips. Later on, I asked her if she knew what they were called and she said, “Yeah, tulips.” I commented that earlier she hadn’t been able to remember and she said she knew that.

She asks me a thousand times a day what types of birds are out in the yard. This is a bit sad because I believe just a year ago she knew what they were. It must be so hard to see your mind slipping away like that. Luckily, I think the only two things she really minded giving up were cooking and driving.

We had ice cream with Crème de Menthe on it the other day. I asked her if she could tell what taste the green stuff had, but she couldn’t. When I told her it was mint, she said she couldn’t taste it. I asked then if all her compliments of my cooking weren’t true and she just gave me that, “Oh, honey…” business. No, I know she can taste some things. I think she can still differentiate between the major groups (salty, bitter, sour, sweet). And I know she can tell that Listerine burns—she always squeals when she has to use it and then after she spits it out comments that it’s “as hot as fire.”