Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 August 1882 — Old People at Home. [ARTICLE]

Old People at Home.

When’ in late autumn we attempt to take up one of the plants . which have grown luxuriantly in a garden bed, we find that the danger to its life, in transplanting, is not so much the injury which its large roots are likely to receive, as the smaller ones, which are like little fingers reaching everywhere There is a strange likeness to this in the uprooting of a life which has for years been lived in one home. There is nothing sadder than to see the old father and mother give up their independent life and become inmates of a new home with their children. This change is often, if nht always, urged by sons and daughters from the purest motives. -They feel that the cares of housekeeping, the oversight of a home, are too great burdens for father and mother. “Come and live with us,” they-say, “and take life easy.” But few indeed, are the parents who can adjust themselves to the new relations, and their peculiarly homeless feeling. They seem to fit nowhere. They miss the old neighbors and all the little nameless associations that helped to fill up the measure of their days. They realize, as they never did in the old home, to which they gave tone and direction, how strongly the tide of young life flows on and leaves them behind, and unless their faculities are greatly impaired they are filled with sadness. They have nothing to do. Grandma can knit, and grandpa can do some trifling things, but there is nothing to satisfy them. It is no one’s fault; it is in the nature of things that this should be so; and so it seems that there should be less confidence placed in the appeals of children for their parents to break up the old home before necessity compels them to do s©. In our modern homes there are not many “corners built for old age,” and possibly old age is not content with a corner. However this may be, it certainly appears reasonable that so long as old people are able to carry on the home it is the wisest to leave them in it. I have in mind an aged couple who lived for over fifty years in one home. Their children left them, grandchildren also married and went to new homes, but the old home life went on. Interest in the great world outside was never lost; from constant use their faculties were apparently unimpaired; and when at 85 the mother, through bodily weakness, was compelled to stay in her room, that room became the center of interest in that house and neighborhood. “It is almost sunset,” said the father, “but we like to enjoy the few light hours before dark.” And they did enjoy them. In striking contrast is the remark made by an old man who lived or stayed first with one child and then another, with no settled home. “I wish,” said he, “that when a man comes to my age and condition there might be a law making it legal to shoot him.”