The art of caring

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This article was published 27/03/2021 (1955 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For 100 seniors in a Winnipeg retirement home, happiness is literally in the bag every morning during the pandemic.

That’s because the plain brown paper bags in which their breakfasts are delivered each day are being transformed into eye-catching works of art by kind-hearted and creative staff at their assisted-living facility.

“They (the serving staff) are doing an amazing job and the residents are loving it,” Luise Sawatzky, executive director of The Boulton River Heights Retirement Community on Boulton Bay near Grant Ave., said earlier this week.

“They just thought they’d brighten the residents’ day, bring them more joy during the second lockdown. They’re getting very good at it. These things come from the heart. They really care for the residents. They have a deep love for them.”

Since the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, residents at The Boulton have been getting their meals delivered to their suites because they can’t gather in the facility’s dining room.

Breakfast is typically packed in plain brown paper bags and left on a shelf outside their door, but in late November, when code-red restrictions began, serving staff decided it was time to dish up a little extra joy for the 100 seniors locked down in the 94-suite complex.

Armed with coloured markers, they began decorating the bags every day with squiggly lines and cheerful greetings, but the decorating quickly morphed into something far more elaborate, everything from quirky cartoon characters to highly realistic beach scenes.

Now the residents are just as excited to check out their hand-decorated morning masterpieces as they are to eat breakfast, with some proudly saving the paper bag art and using it to adorn the walls of their suites.

“They (the serving staff) did it on their own. It wasn’t me saying, ‘Go put some artwork on them,’” Sawatzky said. “They’re doing approximately 100 bags every day. That’s a lot and they’re getting really good at it.

“They did it on their breaks and at lunch — that’s how it started. Now they’re just doing it whenever they have time. If it takes some work time that’s OK. The positives far outweigh the time it takes. They are quite the artists.”

She said two full-time members of the 10-person serving staff are the driving force behind the paper bag art, but everyone on the crew chips in to ensure enough bags are decorated for the next day’s breakfast delivery.

“It is very good artwork,” Sawatzky said. “We have one young woman who has really done a lot of it. They get ideas from magazines and other places. They’ve done a fantastic job. I am very proud of the servers and how they’ve done so much wonderful work.

“They spend time at it. The pictures are colourful and the printing is always nice. They make the extra effort. It’s good therapy for all of us to see this. It’s been a hard year for these seniors. It’s not being able to see your children and not being able to go out.”

Sawatzky said the paper-bag Picassos are lifting the spirits of the facility’s seniors at a difficult time. “It really makes their day. The residents are sending notes to the serving staff saying, ‘I don’t know how you think up all the designs on the bags, but keep them coming.’”

The Free Press learned of the morning masterpieces in a touching letter resident Joan Grenon sent to Editor Paul Samyn, along with three decorated bags, one featuring a watermelon transformed into a cat, one with a baby dinosaur, and one featuring a tropical beach scene suitable for framing.

“I’m extremely impressed with the effort and I’m impressed with their devotion to the project because it’s a heck of a lot of work,” Grenon, 89, said in a phone chat this week.

“My response initially was this was a sweet idea, but their patience has amazed me, the ability to come up with these ideas and stay with it. Most of us would get tired, but they have not. They just keep on going.”

She said she used the decorated bags as place-mats for outdoor hot-chocolate gatherings with her great-grandchildren when those were permitted, while another resident covered her balcony door, then her bedroom door with the bags.

It’s hard to get together during the pandemic, but she’s overheard other seniors telling servers: “Oh, you make my day. I wait every morning to see what it will be.”

In turning simple paper bags into a canvas for original art, she said, the servers have given these seniors the most important gift of all — something to look forward to each morning.

“There’s a certain excitement because you just don’t know what it will be,” she said. “It might be a coffee cup with hearts coming out of it. They have great imagination.”

Grenon said she wrote to the Free Press because she believes the entire city needs to hear an uplifting story amid the gloom of the pandemic. Seniors at The Boulton were excitedly awaiting their second vaccine injection Thursday.

“I thought that the city needed some good news to do with seniors,” she said. “There’s been such an accent on the bad things happening to seniors, and this is a good thing happening to seniors.”

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca