Dad answered and put me on speakerphone, then placed a plastic plate divided into five colored sections in front of mom at their kitchen table and said, it’s Laura, time for your morning medicines; I said, Mom, pick up the biggest oval white pill in the center of the plate and she said, “which one?” and I said the biggest oval white pill in the center of the plate, and she said, “I didn’t know it was my job to take it,” and I heard her lift the glass of iced water, so I read aloud to her the Brian Doyle piece about the little kids playing soccer and stopping to carry a praying mantis off the field, and then I paused and said, Mom, take the oval burgundy capsule, the one in the purple section of the plate, and she said, “after I swallow my cereal,” and I waited, and she said, “I have taken that burgundy pill, and it’s gone,” and I read aloud the George Ella Lyon poem about being lifted up “like a post hole digger” to climb into the bathroom window when Lyon was little and her family was locked out of the house; then I told mom to pick up the tiniest flat white pill in the green section of the plate, and she said, “I don’t know what it’s for,” and I said, that’s your blood pressure pill, and she said “if you’re sure,” and I said yes, that’s the one, and she said, “well, okay,” and I read to her the Brian Doyle essay called “God” about the bus of kindergarten kids passing by, one boy wearing a green and purple dinosaur hat, and then I told mom to pick up the gray oblong pill, the one in the orange section of the plate, and she said, “I don’t have any water,” and I called out—perhaps too loudly—Dad, Mom needs water, and then I heard the pouring into the glass, so I said pick up that gray oblong pill in the orange section and I’ll read the George Ella Lyon poem about the lady sticking fingernail clippers and pipe cleaners and coin purses up “on the library wall above the couch” to see if her husband notices, and mom giggled and said, “I like that one,” and I said I do, too.
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Laura Johnsrude is a retired pediatrician living in Louisville, Kentucky. Her essays have been published or are forthcoming in Fourth Genre, Bellevue Literary Review, River Teeth, Hippocampus, Brevity, Appalachian Review, The Spectacle, Please See Me, Minerva Rising, Drunk Monkeys, Under the Gum Tree, The Examined Life Journal, Sweet, Swing, and in The Boom Project anthology. She is Assistant Book Review Editor for the literary magazine Good River Review. Her essay, “Beholding Something Fine,” in the Fall 2023 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, received a Pushcart Prize nomination.

Artwork by Dinty W. Moore