From my paper journal:

Loverboy and I engage in these verbal sparrings that leave me terribly exasperated. I get to my wits’ end and think I can’t take it anymore, I want to get away from it, it’s no use.

Then, the next time I see him, he’ll surprise me by being his sensible, loving self again, and I am totally disarmed. And in love once more. It’s quite the wondrous thing.

I love the smell of his skin.
I love kissing his mouth.
I love the masculine grace of his body — the way he stands, walks, moves.
I love his hands — their size, their shape, their sureness.

Parts of my body warm up as I write these things, as I think about the way he looks and tastes and smells and feels. But I do not put this book away, turn over, and instigate lovemaking with the man snoring here beside me in this bed. No.

I enjoy the heat. He rolls over to face the other way. I stretch, content to leave him sleeping. I do not have an itch that needs scratching. I have a healthy sense of being alive, of smouldering lava in key places.

There are many times like these, when I think of or watch him and feel lust. He finds that impossible to believe, because I do not always instigate a sexual encounter on these occasions. I may simply focus on the sensation itself instead of acting upon it. This is apparently unthinkable to L.

I explain it to him by saying “I am a woman, not a man. Maybe there is a difference bigger than the obvious visual ones. Maybe I do not feel driven, as you do, to pursue a pleasure other than the one I am already enjoying. Maybe I am slower to heat to boiling point.”

People and animals were gathered in front of the newspaper office a block away from the hotel where we had our supper. The vet was in town giving pets their shots, and there was a pretty good turnout.

Halfway down the block we met Lucille in her wheelchair, holding two newly shorn dogs by their leashes, and her husband, Buck, walking beside her. Loverboy pulled over to the side of the street to chat with them.

“You get to work!” he called out to Buck, who yelled back “No YOU get to work!”

This is the typical banter between them when they meet. Buck is a farmer’s son who had a machinery accident as a young man and suffered brain injury, evidenced by some speech impediments and a reduction in cognitive functioning. He had to come live and work in town here, where there are both homes and employment for the mentally and physically impaired.

There he met and married Lucille, whom I met for the first time last night although I have seen her around town. Her physical handicaps are severe — it looks like she has no torso to speak of except for a sizable chest — and both of them have some difficulty with speech, as I found them hard to understand.

They have managed to purchase their own home and make a noticeable success of their independence from the group-living situation they started out with, and before the conversation was over they asked Loverboy if he’d have a look at a van they are thinking of buying. They aren’t sure if the asking price, with trade-in of the vehicle they own now, is fair.

So today we’re going to town so he can check out the vehicle and tell them what he thinks.

And I’m going to buy my sweetie a late lunch at the drive-thru, where buffalo burgers are all the rage. Then I’m off to my home town to see my granny.

9 a.m.
One perk of having no kids at home for a week is that we can up and go whenever we want, wherever we want, without a thought to whether it’s a good time for the boys to go or arranging for someone to be close by in case they need help.

So we have been going out for supper more often than we normally do.

Last night we went to the hotel restaurant in town, and had steak sandwiches — which I order because the meat tastes so good with the garlic toast. Then we headed over to the special-care home to visit with Vincent.

He is put to bed at 3:30 in the afternoon now. He had a sore caused by pressure on his tailbone from sitting in his wheelchair, and it had been healing when one of the caregivers jammed him into his chair and tore it open again, effectively cancelling out a year-and-a-half of healing. So he has been spending most of his time in bed for the past two months, and must yet lay there for another month.

He was feeling pretty down last night, and angry about this woman’s carelessness and the fact that the administration does not accept his version of events. “Oh no,” they assure him when he tells them what happened, “it was a combination of things.” Well no, it wasn’t. It was her incompetence.

He is disheartened.

“I usually take it all in stride,” he told me when Loverboy had gone down the hall to talk with his aunt, who is also a resident there. “I’ve had lots of surgeries with long recovery periods, and they never got me down like this. This is so — so unnecessary.”

He still smiles, he still laughs, but we could see the suffering on his face. His bed is by the open window, where he can look out and even smell the spring day and the peaceful evening. But he can’t get out into it.

It’s not physical pain he is feeling. No. He can’t feel anything from the chest down, except for the use he has of one arm.

We sat in his room for an hour, then went to spend some time with L’s aunt. She’d been home on the farm for the weekend and looked content and chipper. She’s had health problems for many years — she had her first surgery to remove a brain tumour when she was younger than L and I are. Now she needs constant care and can’t live at home because L’s uncle can’t stay in the house and operate the farm at the same time. Funding for home-care help was cut, and left them no choice but to move her to the institution.

That’s how Maxine ended up out here initially. She was hired as a live-in caretaker and while there, fell in love with L’s cousin Ole, moved over to his house, and married him last summer.

As usual, when we walk out of that place we are subdued. There is not much to say; we have no answer to the question “What can we do for them?” We have seen a lot of people with very little life left in them, as well as those who simply aren’t having much of a life in this institutional setting.

Vincent said “I wish they’d get some younger nurses. You know -- fresher.”