From the Relief Society Magazine, April 1968 –

To Visit the Sick

By Vangie Mae Blair

Louise Farmer leaned back in her chair and glared at her blanket-draped legs propped on the old footstool and felt sorry for herself. She knew it was stupid to feel that way. She was really very lucky, but that didn’t seem to make any difference. This was the first time in her life she had been tied down. Even after the birth of each of her five children she had always been able to get up and do things. Not much, of course, but still she had never felt so physically trapped as she felt now.

“All because of a silly little operation,” she said to the vase of wilted daffodils on the table beside her.

Oh, but it wasn’t silly, she mentally reminded herself, with a sad shake of her gray head. An operation for her varicose veins had been necessary, important, and for her own good. The doctor had told her that over and over again.

“And now all you will have to do,” he had said, “is to keep off your feet and give everything a chance to adjust.” As if it was easy to keep off your feet and do nothing. That was the hardest thing in the world, just ask anyone who ever tried it!

She looked around the room in disgust. There was a thin film of dust on her tables, television, and buffet. The rug by the door needed straightening, and all of the flowers were wilted and needed to be thrown away and fresh ones cut and arranged.

It would be so easy, she thought, just to take fifteen minutes and fix it all up.

But she had given her word to the doctor that she would follow, to the letter, his orders of extremely limited movement. All her life she had kept her promises. She was going to keep this one, even if it nearly killed her to do it.

What really topped it off, she thought to herself with a vengeance, was that today was the Sabbath and she couldn’t go to her meetings. The benches in the chapel were too hard and much too close together to let her use a footstool to keep her feet up. Oh, she could go and sit on the benches sideways and put her legs up along the bench, but she wasn’t going to make a public spectacle of herself at her age.

A squeak and a bang of the front gate caused her to turn and look out of the window. Bobby Johnson was coming up the path, and with the exactness of childhood, he was very carefully stepping only in the center of each and every flagstone.

He jumped up onto the wooden porch and knocked on her door.

“Come in,” she called out.

“Hello, Sister Farmer, how are you today?” he said further wrinkling the rug as he twisted around and firmly shut the door behind him.

“Fine, Bobby,” she answered as she watched him walk over to the large, pink wing chair across from her. One of his shoelaces had come untied, and it dragged along the beige linoleum each time he put that foot down.

He perched himself on the edge of the chair and looked at her. A large grin lit up his face and wrinkled his freckled nose. In the glow of such a cute, all-out smile, Louise felt herself smiling back at him.

Bobby is certainly pleased with himself about something, Louise thought, so she asked, “What brings you here? Did your mother send you over for something?”

“No,” Bobby said and started to swing his crossed feet back and forth.

His loose shoelace danced enthusiastically on every down swing. Bobby looked down at his erring lace and bent forward almost double to tie it. His bottom hung precariously on the edge of the chair and Louise felt that any minute he would lose whatever balance he had and she would see him fall, smack, onto the top of his blonde head.

He didn’t fall, and she sighed with relief as he straightened up, red-faced from his task.

“I went to Sunday School this morning, and my teacher told us some things that Jesus told us to do on Sunday and one was to visit the sick and afflict them, so here I am.”

After announcing his good works to her, he wiggled back into the large chair, folded his arms, and smiled complacently at her.

Louise smothered a smile with difficulty and said, “Thank you.

“You’re welcome.”

Louise was at a loss. Just how does one talk to a small boy who comes to visit the sick and afflict them?

From the depths of the chair Bobby looked around the room for a moment and then announced, “Your flowers are dead.”

“Yes, Bobby, I know. They need to be thrown out and fresh ones put in their place.”

“Ill do it,” Bobby said as he hopped out of the chair and picked up the vase of daffodils from the table beside her and started towards the bouquets on the television and the buffet.

Louise pushed herself forward from the chair and started to protest, when Bobby added, “Jesus said that we’re supposed to help people.”

She sank back into her chair again. She was plainly in the hands of a doer of good works. After all, things are only things, but people, especially children, are special.

Bobby tucked the vase of daffodils in the crook of his left elbow and hugged a vase of wilted flowers to his chest with his left hand. With his right hand he picked up the vase of hothouse flowers her daughter had left when she had come to clean house and visit last Monday.

Somehow, Bobby made it across the floor and into the kitchen with only one tiny spill on the floor. She heard him dump the water into the sink and pull the flowers out of the vases.

He opened the back door and she heard a rattling thump as the old flowers hit the garbage can. After the back door was shut again, there was silence for a space and then a small voice said, “I dripped, where’s the mop?”

“Standing up at the side of the house behind the garbage can.”

“Oh,” he said, as the back door opened and then shut again.

Louise smiled as she heard the scratchy sound of a dry mop on the kitchen floor. She had always admired Brother and Sister Johnson for the way they were rearing their family, now she admired them even more. There aren’t too many little boys who would try to clean up their messes.

There was a pause in the mopping and a drawer was pulled open. From the sound of the various crashes and clinks, Bobby had pulled out the utensil drawer. He went out the back door, dragging the mop behind him and firmly shut the door.

In the house all was quiet. Too quiet, Louise thought, as she strained to hear what was going on outside. After what seemed a very long time, Bobby came in at the back door again. Faintly, the smell of lilacs drifted into the front room.

Why, she didn’t know the lilacs were blooming! They grew around on the other side of the garage, and she hadn’t been able to walk there to see them. She thought, if it weren’t for Bobby I would have missed the lilacs this year.

Louise heard the splashing of tap water in the sink as Bobby filled the vases. She suddenly thought of something.

“Bobby!”

“What?” he called as he poked his head through the doorway. The water was still running in the sink.

“Could you please put some plates under the vases so the water won’t stain the woodwork?”

“Okay,” he said, and disappeared.

Louise leaned back in her chair and listened to the small, friendly noises coming from the kitchen.

Sometime later, Bobby came in with three plates and put one each on the television, the buffet, and the table by her chair.

When he came into the front room again his slow steps proclaimed that he was carrying the flowers. This first vase he carefully placed on the television. He stepped back with satisfaction and skipped back into the kitchen.

Louise smiled. The lilacs in the vase looked as if they had been exploded into their present positions. They hung outward and down at alarming angles. Not one of them stood up the least little bit. The stems were too long, and a few of them stayed in only because they had caught on the inside of the sharply curved neck of the vase. It was a pottery vase that her oldest daughter had made in a college ceramics class, and, for the first time, Louise was glad that it was as heavy as lead.

The second vase of flowers Bobby brought in was filled with what she figured were the remaining blooms of her early bulb garden. Miraculously, all of them were standing straight up in the small, white milkglass vase. When she complimented Bobby on getting them to stay all together so tall, he smiled and said, “I wrapped them together with toilet paper before I put them in the vase. See!” He lifted them up. There was a mass of white sogginess gluing the stems together.

Louise looked from the flowers to Bobby’s proudly smiling face.

“That’s nice,” was all she managed to say.

Satisfied, Bobby put the flowers down and went back for the last vase whose arrangement could be called “various.” Bobby had picked a few of every type of flower he could find, and some weren’t even flowers!

There were small yellow flowers from the ditchbank. Their poor little stems were so short that he had balanced their blooms on the edge of the vase, like children hanging their chins over the backs of chairs. A few early blooms, with most of their petals shaken off, stood tall and bare in the center. There were some field daisies and some purple ones that were definitely weeds. Standing aloof in the bunch was a rosebud. Bobby pointed to it proudly and said, “I got that one from my Daddy’s bush.”

“Bobby, they are all lovely. Thank you very much,” she said softly.

The little boy walked carefully back over to the wing chair and sat down. He looked at Louise’s legs and asked her, “Do they hurt?”

“No, Bobby, not really.”

There was silence for awhile.

“Would you like a peanut butter sandwich? I make them good.”

“No, thank you.”

“You don’t have to worry about the bread knife being dirty. I washed all the flower juice off of it and dried it real nice. I can cut bread in slices, too. Sometimes they fall into crumby pieces, but most of the time I can cut bread into whole slices. Let me fix you a big fat peanut butter sandwich, okay?”

“I wish you could, Bobby, but the doctor said I’m not supposed to eat things like that until I can get up and walk around.” Louise looked at Bobby’s face slowly losing its sunshine smile, so she softly added, “But, if you like, you can get me an apple from the refrigerator. You may have one, too.”

“I’ll get one for you,” he said, “but I can’t have one because I’m visiting you.”

Louise was so busy watching Bobby walking proudly into the kitchen to “help” her that the knock on the front door startled her.

“Come in,” she called.

Sister Johnson came in.

“Is Bobby still here? He said he was coming over to visit you, but that was quite a while ago and I don’t want him to tire you out.”

“Oh, no, Bobby’s not tiring me out. He has been helping me.”

Louise gestured with her hand to indicate the new flower arrangements.

Sister Johnson smiled and walked over to the television to balance the lilacs better in their vase. As she turned and poked the flowers, they assumed a more traditional look.

“Yes, he is a big help at times, isn’t he?” she asked half smiling.

In the kitchen the water tap was turned on and the splashing sounds meant Bobby was dutifully washing the apple before bringing it in.

The two women looked at each other with understanding.

“Sister Farmer, would you like to go to church with us this evening?”

“I’d love to go. I miss not going to my meetings, but I just can’t sit that long on those benches.”

“I’ve got that all figured out,” said Sister Johnson. “We can put all of the children in the very back of our station wagon, and you can sit sideways on the seat going there. When we get there, you can use our aluminum chaise lounge, you know, the folding one with green webbing that we bought last summer.”

Louise Farmer looked around her front room and thought how nice it would be to get out of the house. She had so missed partaking of the sacrament. If she could sit at the very back. . . . “Yes,” she said, “I will go with you. Thank you so very much for asking me.”

Bobby came out of the kitchen with a bright apple in his hand.

“Hello, Mother. Did you come visiting the sick, too?” he asked.

“That’s part of it,” Sister Johnson said, smiling, “but mostly I came to get my visiting boy.”

“Did I visit you all right?” Bobby asked Louise.

“Yes, Bobby, you visited me just fine. I’m glad you came.” She held out her hand and Bobby took it, “and please come again.”

“I will,” said Bobby, as he went out the door.

“We’ll be by to pick you up fifteen minutes before church,” said Sister Johnson, as she closed the door.

Louise looked over her now silent house and smiled at her new flowers. Somehow, the dust on things didn’t look quite so bad. The water spot on the floor was slowly drying to a dull uneven shadow, but her daughter would clean that up when she came to clean tomorrow.

Let’s see, she thought, to herself, what can I wear to church?

Then she smiled at herself, because she realized that when a woman starts wondering what she can wear, she is well on the road to recovery.