Everybody hugs. They greet them with a hug. They hug them goodby.

Michaelena Walters, 63, recently became a great - grandmother, but she has little time for the new baby. She spends all but two days a week caring for her 87-year-old mother, Nena Ullsberg. On Tuesdays and Thursdays her mother goes to Fitzgerald House and has fun, and Walters and her husband, Ralph, take the day off. The Walterses live in Thousand Oaks. My Mom was born in Russia and contracted polio there. My grandfather used to carry her on his back to the hot springs and massage her legs. That hot-water therapy kept her from being a lot more crippled than she is.

She has angina, and she did lose a leg because of diabetes, and it was her good leg. The worse leg from the polio now has arthritis, and it’s kind of turning the foot in and under, so she’s wearing one of those soft braces permanently. But it helped her so she can at least maneuver in a walker. She doesn’t have to rely totally on the wheelchair, which I’m grateful for. The more active she is, the less apt the diabetes is to take over again.

The angina and diabetes are under control now. We don’t even have to have insulin. We’re just watching her diet. She has to eat every four hours. Shopping takes a long time, because I have to read everything on the labels. They keep changing labels, so I can’t just go for the same products every time and relax. We eat nothing with nitrates in it or preservatives, sugar, salt, all of these things. There are times that I have to go to two or three different stores to get what I need. So it amounts to time.

The worst part as far as both of us are concerned is that we are totally housebound. Actually you’re devoting your life to the senior parent. When the children are at the point in their lives when they’re looking forward to retirement and have lots of plans, those plans all go out the window. Red is 68 and retired, and we were looking forward to going backpacking and spending as much time in the Sierras as possible and not having to rush back.

I was looking forward to doing a lot more weaving. I was a weaving teacher, and in fact I’ve got three looms. But I haven’t been able to do that, because there’s things that you have to do on a daily basis. The bathroom, for instance, has to be sterilized and sanitized and so forth every day.

Four years ago my daughter did some checking into different places where Mom might go. When she found Fitzgerald House, a day care center for advanced seniors in Thousand Oaks, we just told Mom she had to go. So we took her down there, and I think she was there for about an hour and she was in love. One little lady, she’s well into her 90s now, came over and greeted her and gave her a big hug, and said, “This is the best thing that ever happened to me and you’re going to love it.” Now Mom goes there two days a week.

Everybody hugs. They greet them with a hug. They hug them goodby. And they get all of this contact. At home we don’t do as much as we should. You know, we get busy with so many other things. They have crafts, they have exercises daily, they have a hot meal for lunch, they sing, and she’s always bringing home things that she’s made.

I feel the release of the pressure on the days that she’s there, because I’m not on a time schedule between 9 and 3. Mostly it gives us time to go out and walk and do whatever we want to do. I have the feeling that I can just sit around and do nothing if I want to. It had a big impact, because it gives us a breather and I know that she’s happy and at least two days a week she’s active.

Mom is a special person. She’s quite an accomplished artist. She’s done mostly water colors, but she’s done oils, and she’s done lithographs, and she illustrated three children’s books about Vietnamese families who came to Thousand Oaks.

She just doesn’t complain. She’s not really demanding the way some other people describe their parents. She has her moods, like we all do. But they’re so far apart that we are fortunate. We’ve got an easy person to care for.