Sometimes we forget how much comfort we can derive from a simple touch.

An elderly Italian woman with chin length pale blonde hair and piercing blue eyes sat in front of a desk that curved around her. Her right arm slid slowly across the table from her right side to her left, and then slowly back. “Push push push push push,” she cheered herself on. After several repetitions, she stopped and looked at the young girl sitting beside her. The girl smiled a huge smile and told her, “one more.” “Push push push push push,” the elderly woman went. When she finished, she once again turned to the girl beside her. “Finito?” The girl nodded. “Yes! You did a great job! Let’s take a rest.”

The girl reaches up to touch the old woman’s hair. “You have really pretty hair.” The grandmother looks at the girl’s long black hair and tells her she has really beautiful healthy hair. The grandmother asks, “How long have you been working here?” The girl tells her, “For about four months now.” The grandmother nods.

The grandmother begins to tell the young girl her story. She tells the story of how it happened, how it affected her right side, and how she ended up here. She talks about the impact on her family. Her granddaughter was around the same age as the girl.

Then she looks up slowly, her eyes with a distant look in them. “Sometimes I ask my mom and dad to take me too.” The young girl puts her hand on the grandmother’s arm. Then her blue eyes look straight into the young girl’s and in that moment, they share a common understanding.

A touch that communicated something words cannot.
Maybe it provided a little bit of support and strength for her to hold on a little bit longer.

An old lady is standing by the kitchen counter.  She looks more than ninety years old, and has a cane beside her in case she loses her balance again.  She has a pair of kitchen scissors in one hand, and is cutting something.

With a closer look, you’ll see that she’s cutting bread. On a plate are pieces of already cut up bread, that are about a quarter of the original size. She takes out another piece of bread from the bag.

The bread has grown mould, and three or four fuzzy dark spots could be seen on the slice of bread.  She’s not just cutting the bread up into smaller pieces, she’s cutting the mould off. To eat the bread.

She works at it without a spoken word, and gives no hint that that’s what she was doing. A moment later, her daughter enters the room. The old lady goes at it in such an innocent fashion that her daughter doesn’t realize right away. Her daughter does a double take and stops in horror.

She grabs the bread from her elderly mother.

“There’s mould on this bread you can’t eat this! Listen to me, you’ll get sick eating this!” Her daughter is yelling, clearly upset. “Everyone worries about you’re health, you can’t do this! This is mould, it’s gone bad!”

Her mother looks up at her calmly. “This isn’t so bad, if I just cut this off…”

“NO! This is mould, you can’t eat this!” Her daughter finds herself repeating herself. “Your health is more important, you can’t eat this!” She sees the already neatly cut up pieces of bread on the plate, and tears well up in her eyes.

The plate and bag of bread all ends up in the trash.

Watching this made me cry today. Something about this scene is so sad and so heart wrenching.