Love is what you do.

"Love isn't how you feel. It's what you do." 
Madeleine L'Engle 

If Madeleine L'Engle is right then I must be feeling a whole lotta love! There is snow headed our way so that meant an early trip to the grocery store to make sure we had the prerequisite milk and bread. 
 

For Donna there must be Greek yogurt, and sugar, and half & half because she lives on those. One of the most interesting things about the Alzheimer's brain is its increased  need for sugar. This isn't true for just Donna, and there's some interesting science behind her desperate need for Klondike bars - The Alzheimer's Project

One of the most difficult things about the progression of Donna's Alzheimer's is that I have to take on more and more. When Donna quit working she was still driving to familiar places. She could still use her GPS and cell phone. She still paid the bills. All of those things are long gone. It's been 3 years since she was officially diagnosed, and 5 years since she insisted to our nurse practitioner that there was something wrong. While so much has changed, so much remains the same.

With or without Alzheimer's there's always so much to do: laundry, pellets for the pellet stove to bring in and trash to take out, cooking and cleaning, and a million other things. While I'm busy doing all these things, Donna manages to do things as well. She is still making very simple quilts, she loves to color bright drawings with markers in all hues, and watching the birds at the feeder. I suppose those prove that she still loves life.

When people say, "I don't know how you do it" I say - what other choice is there - because we both love our lives - so we don't just feel that love; we do the things that show the evidence of that love. I'll try to remind myself of all of this later, because when I have to shovel 8 inches of snow I won't be humming a love song. I guarantee it!