Still crazy after all these years

I talked to my mom on the phone last night.  No, my mom's not crazy, but her aunt (my great-aunt) is.

Aunt D has always been a little eccentric and spacey.  She is very tall, at least six foot, and thin, even more so now that she is 83.  With her height, slender build, unusual voice and a hairstyle that's firmly entrenched in the sixties, she reminds me of Big Bird from Sesame Street.  Aunt D has the same sort of naivete as her yellow-feathered twin.

Once Aunt D has something in her head, there is no persuading her otherwise.  Just recently she was adamant that she needed to take care of a CD renewal 10 days before the CD matured.  My mom is still trying to convince her that the CD needs to mature first and then she has 10 days to decide if she wants to cash it in or renew it.  Good luck Mom.

But what my mom told me on the phone last night made all of Aunt D's previous misunderstandings and funny notions seem positively normal.

On Sunday Aunt D fell and shattered her right wrist.  Unfortunately she is right-handed.  It's quite likely she will need to have surgery, but for now her wrist is in a hard cast. 

My mom commented how difficult it was to do most tasks one-handed, but especially so if you were without the use of your dominant hand.  She went on to say that she had no idea how Aunt D would be able to make up her bed every night.

My response: how hard is it to pull the covers up and smooth out the wrinkles?  In fact I opined that it wouldn't be the end of the world if Aunt D took a break from making the bed, especially if she wasn't bothering to make it until just before she climbed in to go to sleep.*

What my mom said next fully cemented in my mind the fact that Aunt D is truly off her rocker.  My mom explained that Aunt D takes the sheets completely off her bed every morning, folds them neatly and places them at the end of her bed.  When it's time to go to sleep, she puts the sheets back on the bed.

How insane is that?

I'm not sure, but I think I probably asked my mom why in the hell Aunt D did something crazy like that, and she said that was the way Aunt D's mother had always done it, so that was the way she did it too.

Crazy.  Absolutely batsh*t crazy.  It's hard enough to struggle with a fitted sheet on laundry day, let alone wrestle to get one on your bed every night.  And if you have a broken wrist, why would you put yourself through that kind of torture?  In Aunt D's defense, she does have a twin bed, so it's not like she's dealing with king size sheets.  However, her bed is up against a wall, so she's not able to freely walk all around the mattress to tuck the sheets in.  It all sounds like way too much unnecessary work to me.

Oh my gosh, I just had a thought -- I wonder if Aunt D takes the mattress pad off every day too!        

*In the interest of full disclosure, I rarely, ie. almost never, make my bed and usually my husband is the one who straightens out the rumpled sheets and blankets before he goes to bed.