After I got put in the nerve hospital they said it was up to me to make that my home, but I couldn’t forget my old home I used to have and they said they knew I couldn’t, they had more people that couldn’t and were sorrowing about it. I wasn’t sorrowing so much as I was just steady hoping I could get back to where I used to be.

I love to work—any kind of work will glorify His name—and they tried me in the kitchen first. I had to do with cups and saucers, jelly and all that. It was a fast place and a fine one, getting dinners ready to carry to the sick. Pretty soon, though, they believed I was getting a little too interested in it—they would put me in the laundry. Well, it was down in the basement. People were flying backward and forward pushing those carts and laughing and I began to lose track of what my part was. I was almost lost down there before I could find somebody to tell I wasn’t working. The next I remember, they tried me out on mopping. I caught on to that without a bit of trouble. I had my own mop and bucket and started out after breakfast every morning. The colored stripes on the floor took me around to halls you wouldn’t of thought would be there. But pretty soon my tracks got to overlapping. What happened was wherever I mopped people were calling, trying to find some help—the ones that couldn’t get up. If I put my mop down and traveled to see what it was a person wanted, the nurses believed I had quit. I wouldn’t do that for anything in the world, so to keep them from thinking I was I mopped on up to whoever wanted to see me and this veered my tracks around. Mopping has to be straight, the nurses said, from one place to the next one.

I knew what they meant all right, but I couldn’t stop answering up. Sometimes a gentleman wouldn’t want anything more than his teeth that would be in a jar of water too far for him to reach at, but other times a person was trying to get word to a daughter in California and I’d have to remember her name by heart and then the street she stayed on so I could write a letter. By this time I would forget who wanted her, people were all along the halls, but when the answer came back the hospital people would know. They were wise in all ways. They hid their stamps and envelopes because they came so high and I had to wait until they left their desks to even get mine. But then the letter couldn’t get mailed unless I put it right back in front of them. They began telling me to stay in one place and quit doing different things. If I didn’t stay out of their way, they said, they were going to move me in with a lady from Collinsville. Nobody could stay with that lady because she was trying to talk on a hill. I told them I wouldn’t mind, I needed some company myself and we could stay together. Well, they gave me a brand-new number and took me down to the end of a locked-up place that was just one room but it had two separate beds. Sure enough, there was a lady in there that was talking a mile a minute. I hadn’t heard about the hill, the nurse told her, and so she was putting me back here to listen. She had to be tied down because she ran away (the lady, I mean), and I could change her diaper and do other things for her to save them that much time. They locked us both up then, and I begged the lady’s pardon till I could slow her some. I hadn’t ever been to Collinsville, I told her, and she’d need to start all over, the part she was telling now I couldn’t understand.

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