My parents, as they are getting older, have become hoarders. They tend to have too much of a lot of things, and as a result, the house is always filled with clutter when I come home. They don’t really see it as clutter, but anyone in their right mind would recognize all of this as a big cluttered mess as soon as they walked into this house. Endless odds and ends are stacked on top of each other, side by side, in pretty much every single room. I really don’t understand how they can live like this and luckily not trip and fall over a lot of this junk, but I suppose that’s what hoping for the best and praying is for.

One of the things I noticed in the kitchen was this very old, huge rice tin that my grandma used to use to store rice. It’s an item in the house that my grandma owned and used, so as a legacy of sorts, I suppose my mom also started putting rice in it, as well. Months before Ed passed away in 2013, our mom bought a sack of white jasmine rice that was about 40 pounds. And I remember when catastrophe struck and I came home, one of the things she lamented was the sack of rice. She bought it assuming he’d still be with them living at home, and that the rice would feed him, too. “Who is going to eat all this rice now?” she asked me rhetorically, in the midst of hysterics now that her son was gone forever.

That thought really stung today. And now that my mom is pre-diabetic and being told she should avoid white rice, it made me think even more about that.