Hummingbird
The summer before Nana’s 97th birthday, she lived in a home I dubbed The House of Death. My grandma had moved into this final home after she slipped on another area rug and fell. Those innocuous flopsy things she liked to decorate with were quite dangerous. She had a series of falls which led her to the last home.
It all began when Nana snagged her foot under the four-by-five faux Turkish rug by her bedside. That spill landed her in the hospital with a broken hip. While convalescing in the hospital, my mother and two aunts made the necessary arrangements — she had to move out of Barrington Place, her last one-bedroom apartment. But this wasn’t an easy task. Nana was independent and liked to live on her own. Even when she turned ninety, she kept zipping around Los Angeles in her silver Honda sedan. Though we knew assisted living seemed like a much safer alternative, she wouldn’t stop decorating with area rugs. After her broken hip incident, she moved into the most prestigious Jewish senior living community in the 90210 zip code — The Carmel.
You’d think a lady as smart as Nana would have given up area rugs long ago, but she didn’t. I noticed her newer assisted living apartment was soon spruced up by a few more of these decorative schmattas placed over the carpeting. It wasn’t long until she fell yet again. “I got wobbly,” she explained, as if the rug had nothing to do with it. This time, Nana’s…
