This past Monday morning, as I’m getting our cups of coffee, I hear the “click” of a pill hitting the floor. Did I miss seeing her drop one in her lap? I turn to find the dog nosing a yellow aspirin tablet and quickly move to pick it up. It’s damp. I guess the dog didn’t want it after all.

I put it on the table and start to get a replacement, but Mom waves me away.

“I don’t want that. It’s hard.”

The light bulb comes on. It’s not wet from the dog; it’s wet because she took it out of her mouth and threw it on the floor.

She had gotten up early, before our alarms, and had already been eating her breakfast cookie by the time I got her meds ready. She didn’t bother to finish chewing her cookie before taking her meds, I didn’t think about it, and the aspirin got cheeked with cookie bits, then mistaken for something hard in the cookie.

*sigh*

This morning, she’s up before our alarms again, and already tucking into her breakfast cookie. I move it out of her reach and tell her to finish what’s in her mouth before I put her meds down on the napkin.

“Okay, I’m finished.”

“You’re still chewing.”

She fishes a bothersome raisin out of her mouth and puts it on one of the four paper napkins spread out in front of her across the tablecloth. That’s one less for this morning’s paper napkin on the end table, I guess.

I lay her meds out on the cloth napkin. She takes all of them. The dogs start barking and I hurry to let them in, since it’s 6:15 am and many of our neighbors are retired.

The dogs run ahead of me, back into the kitchen.

“Are you going to give me my cookie back?”

I move the paper napkin holding the broken cookie back in front of her and take the three steps back to the kitchen counter. I pull her small coffee cup and my giant mug from the cabinet. I fill hers one-third full (the other one-third will be cream), hover the coffee pot above mine, just about to pour and…

“Are you going to get me my coffee?”