Revisiting and Revising

This morning while we were reading the newspaper, Great-gram, told me about the day that she and Daddy were walking on the greenbelt and encountered a rooster. She had been up for awhile when I joined her and she was telling me about hearing this bird and she thought at first it might be a rooster. "You can hear roosters from here...they are over on the Porter road." Uh huh. This is when she filled me in on the rooster she and Daddy saw on their walk, he was headed back that way when they ran into him.
I don't think my Mother has ever told a lie in her life...too firm a believer in Hell fire for that. But, she has embarked on a new phase that relies heavily on fiction or this is the prevarication phase of dementia.
These tales started only recently, but I'm noticing them more and more. They always come up as examples of something that proves a point she is making.
For example, her Johnson relations have always given a passing nod to a distant connection to the late LBJ. With their noses and ears, there's little doubt that this connection does indeed exist. But the other day when I was reading a biography of Johnson, she began to tell me in some detail about when the brothers parted company and one went to Polk County and the other to the Perdenales. I don't know, but I'm pretty certain that this is the first time she ever told all these particulars and I think they came right off the top of her head.
Another development happened earlier this week. I stayed up late watching a movie and she suddenly appeared in the room and asked me who had been in the room. I told her no one had been in the room, she heard the television. No, she had seen a woman and some boxes, one round and one square stacked in the middle of the room. I assured her that it was just a very vivid dream and that she could go back to bed, but she insisted that someone had been there. That's the new part...the insistence.
I know that I can't keep her here and keep her well forever, but it isn't easy to watch her decline. She's not as tall as she was and she is in almost constant pain in her back and hip, but her appetite is good. I made her some potato salad at lunch time the day before yesterday and she ate like a little pig. You just have to find the thing that she is hungry for.
She talks  about things that happened when she was a child more than she ever has. She is remembering and wants us to know things about her that we may not have known. But she is still very much engaged with what's going on today. She lives for pictures of her great grandchildren. Thank You Lord for the Internet and text messages and Skype. One thing for sure, she is intensely anti-Romney. I'm betting on her to be around to vote against him.