Knuckling Down and the Circumstances of my Life, Leaving Walnuts on the Tray

Knuckling Down and the Circumstances of my Life, Leaving Walnuts on the Tray

Sometimes you will be trying to do one thing and your mind will detach itself from the given task to begin running merrily down another path entirely. It is Saturday afternoon and after some time spent in the kitchen making and processing pear sauce, I am at last sitting down with my cup of green tea reading my latest selection, a mystery while Chuck Mangione’s “Children of Sanchez” plays in the background.  The mystery is one that I have been trying to finish reading for the past month.  I find that I will have to renew it yet again from the library (guess what, third time is not a charm according to the library, two strikes of renewal is all you get). It is a good read, Christopher Fowler’s The Water Room and I was refusing to give it up until I discovered that I could not renew it.  I was working hard on reading it while my dear husband worked in the kitchen cooking my dinner.  Chicken Enchiladas is on the menu for those who wish to have their mouths watering regarding my meal.  

My distraction is this, this writing. The stuff that keeps filling my mind was so persistent that I finally had to put my bookmarker in the pages of my book and look for a notebook.  Yes, I do use a pen and paper while writing.  It is so much easier to mark out what I didn’t mean to say than the highlighting, the dragging and deleting in my computer.

Knuckling down.  What an odd set of words to haunt my head.  For a bit, I had to return to reading in order to allow the filters to strip out of the way, causing the meaning of the two words to reveal a plan, to lend a drift of coherency to my voice so that  the stitching of letters together might give meaning.

It is at times like this when you are able to reach into the sky and can hold a star in your hand. There is a completeness, a wholeness of being. I like it.  This feeling of being part of everything. I am not sure what it has to do with writing but I end up on a different level somehow when I doing the writing. It seems as if everything is possible.

Well, here it is December 29, 2016, I started this particular blog in summer, in August when the full harvest that comes of the hard work of the farmers in their fields and orchards starts to fill my kitchen with fruits, vegetables and a mad desire to start canning this and that. But now, I am working hard on knuckling down as a friend requested a blog to end the year.  My question is what sorts of expectations and hopes are coming from such a request?  What will pile into my mind and onto the keyboard? We shall see.

I took a couple of hours off from work this morning to put a soup together in the crock pot so it will hopefully be ready for our lunch.  The goodness of the broth from turkey with a large assortment of vegetables and some of the turkey meat chopped up for good measure. It seems to be the one thing that is going my way.

For today has been a day of misadventures that often follows the rush to get ready for work.  The man, my husband, managed to sleep in, and somehow when he does we seem to run out of time getting organized with all of the ordinary chores that we feel necessary to make it out the door.

I had had an idea for such a day entitled, “The Circumstances of my Life”.  It seems relevant to today.  No great disasters but a few small things that happened or didn’t happened.  As most of you know I am living with a gap in my smile due to a broken tooth this summer and the surgery that occurred for a dental implant.  But let me get on with the circumstances of my life. 

It started with breakfast when I was cracking eggs for scrambling.  I had cracked two eggs, opened them into the mixing bowl then I proceed on the third egg, cracking it quickly and very coolly broken it into the compost. When I told my husband, he wisely did not laugh but reminded me that it was a good thing that we had lots of eggs. The scrambled egg sandwiches were good and I was very thankful for the abundance of wholesome eggs in the house. This was item one.

Ah, the circumstances of my life continued after we headed out the door for work.  We made it two blocks before we circled back to check to make sure that the garage door was down for the two great minds in the white Toyota were not sure.  Score one for us.  Door was down. Item two.

We continue down the block to the light.  “My tooth,” I cried, “I forgot my tooth.”  My husband gave me a look wondering if he was going to have to circle the wagons again.  I told him that I would take a break at work and come home to get it, for also, I was planning on coming home to get the soup going.  Item three.  But as we crossed Highway 101 and headed down the street to work.  I said, “I forgot my tea.” This has become known as item four.

This all reminds me of other days, with the tooth forgotten or the day when I wore two different black shoes to work and no one noticed not even me until I was stretching in the break room and happened to look at my shoes quite carefully.  Hmm, good job of dressing this morning.  Another day of my little clothing challenges was while we were on vacation in Ashland for the Shakespeare Festival, I was wearing a short dress with a sweater and finally that night while disrobing that evening I realized that it had been inside out all day, on parade throughout the town, in and out of various restaurants.  I was past embarrassment as the deed was done, the day was done and I was heading to bed.

This all brings me to believe that you sometimes cannot control the circumstances of your life but you need to keep knuckling down and always be willing to laugh somehow, somewhere in your day. 

I seem to be able to control the walnuts that I have patiently waiting on a cookie sheet for me to pick through in order to put them in baggies for the refrigerator.  But I got the walnuts in November and here I am still working on them.  The good news is that my son got his walnuts and hazelnuts in November two weeks after I picked them up.

The walnuts have a migration route.  They are constantly moved from the dining room table where they sit among the clutter of unread books, Christmas cards, a jigsaw puzzle, one emery board, one fleeced purple and pink jacket, two knitted hats and my husband’s laptop, (you get the idea of the treasures hiding on the table) at any rate, they are placed there when I am working on them, then they are put on the washing machine in the laundry room where it is nice and cold to wait for the next chance for me to attend to them.

I find that I have too many things that I want to get done and somehow the circumstances of my life get in the way.  I am fortunate, I realize that each and every day.  It really is the small things that occur each moment to moment that makes the difference.  Which is why I enjoy working with the walnuts, it is a meditative time for me.  I can believe that I am knuckling down to a given task and given enough time this too will be done, completed in some satisfactory way.  So I don’t worry about much else.  The given circumstances of my life can not intrude for this time I am spending at the table.  The only thing that I really need to do with the walnuts is practice my mantra, “Shells, shells, shells.”  This seems to help me put the shells in one bowl without the walnut meat going into the bowl as well.  For whenever I want to put the walnut meat in its bowl, I change my mantra to “Walnuts, walnuts, walnuts.“  It is good to have plan, a routine to keep myself on track.

If I was to put down ideas, goals for the coming year, I can only think of one or two.  To be kind to myself and to my other self, the remarkable man who shares the world with me.  The circumstances of my life come and go, the walnuts will soon be done, and as for knuckling down, well, that will depend on whatever presents itself to me.  Here is to a new year of changes, hope and forgiveness.

Black Friday Without the Hangover

Black Friday without the Hangover

I am spending time off from working at my forty hour a week job. Time off has been going well except on Tuesday when I was living ten hours in the kitchen cooking goodies for the man of the manor.  You see, it was going to be his fifty-eight birthday on Wednesday.  One should celebrate. His request was lasagna which ended up being a day-long event of preparation, of chopping various vegetables, mixing and finally making it into something that you can eat.   Oh, then added a pie worth a standing ovation with all the calories you could want.  Don’t get me wrong, I love being in the kitchen but enough said about my cooking. 

Today is Friday, November 25, 2016.  Plenty of shopping going on.  We heard of a friend who was heading to Eugene early this morning to hit the sales.  They left home at three AM.  Why, we don’t know, and we will probably never know since both my husband and I are not heavy shoppers. My idea of shopping is to hit the small local shops to pick up a few things but not on Black Friday.  My man knows that he is to search for gifts for me at the local Farmers Market or at my friend’s little shop and a few local Artists galleries but really at my age of sixty-two, I am not really interested in any more things.  I don’t need stuff, I have drawers over-flowing with items that were gotten in the past years for birthdays, anniversaries and Christmases.

We have a new member in our house.  For those who have read my past blogs or Facebook posts, you know that we have lost our two cats and have been living in our house with just the two of us since our son is still living in New York.  Our new guest is eighteen, a community college student who is staying with us while her parents are in Arizona.  I am mentioning this because it involved major cleaning of my front bedroom in order to get ready for her coming to stay in our house. So we had to move the clothes out of the five drawer dresser in the bedroom and over half of the stuff in the closet. 

I found things.  Lots of interesting, forgotten purchases of years ago.  I had three bags of various socks.  In my defense, I knew that the socks were there.  I had had the bags in order of the seasons, first, Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter (My Christmas socks) which of course did not count my various socks that had been in the dresser taking up a whole drawer.  So I purged with serious intent, I sorted my socks, placed them in bags to travel to Goodwill.  I was a Goddess recreating the world until I face the reality of my son’s room (The Void).  It is now the room that I sleep in, get dressed in and have my smaller following of socks tucked in a one quarter of the drawer.

Black Friday, I don’t think so.  I will not, cannot, shall not even contemplate heading out the door to join the crowds.  I live in terror, not of someone grabbing my heart’s desire from my ever-reaching fingers but the crowd itself.  The mindless hunters who are willing to elbow, push and tear things from others. So how did I spend my day away from my office?  Did I hide in my house far away from the maddening crowd? (Thomas Hardy) Here is my postings on Facebook today from my two little outings.

November 25, 2016  9 am

Well, I did it.  I went shopping on Black Friday.  I drove down to Nye Beach, parked by Panni Bakery, walked to the top of a street and gazed at the ocean. It wasn’t enough so I walked down to the Nye Beach Turnaround and stood looking out, watching birds riding the waves, bobbing up and down.  For the first time, I was able to watch the waves hit the concrete wall that offers the view with gulls at my sides.  They rested on the fence posts as I held onto the steel cable and breathe in the ocean air.  My shopping trip was successful, satisfying with no real cost at all.  What did I get? Peace of mind, beauty and hope for the world.

November 25, 2016  1 pm

I believe that I am getting this shopping thing on Black Friday down.  I just got back from a fast pace walk of thirty minutes.  Shopping goal was to increase heart rate and respiration. I got more.  As I walked along a street that past a deep ravine, I stopped, I listened and what I heard was water rushing below in a creek unseen as it ran in its bed beneath the tall pines and the large sword ferns. A crow was calling in the sky, a small bird chirped hidden in the trees and I continued on, to watch the water run down the gutters in the street, babbling when it was slowed by leaves caught in a drain and yet, I continued on, up a hill, pacing faster, harder until the rain began telling me to go home.

The sky is darkening at a rapid pace causing the gray to deepen to gloom. I have been working on sorting my cracked walnuts, my first bag of twenty-five pounds.  I may be done with it tonight. Katherine, our temporary sleeper in the front bedroom has made peanut butter cookies, I have eaten two. As for further Black Friday shopping, I am thinking of heading to the kitchen for some of the birthday lasagna, after all, I have spent a great deal of my time on my feet and after a great deal of complaining from them I believe that I will call it a day, at The rest of my day has been staying at home since the weather has moved back in with the drizzle of light rain. At least, until tomorrow.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Top of Form

How fortunate

I have found a new mantra.  It came to me on a Saturday morning when after going to the Farmers’ Market, loading up the car with goodies, my husband heard a noise while we were backing up the car.  Dutifully, I got out and started to look around the car but I could not see anything that we might be backing over.  So happily we went on our way to our house, five minutes away to drop off some of the produce, plums, yellow and white kernel corn, little orange cherry tomatoes, green beans, dark purple grapes and melons.  When we got home, I prepared a box of the vegetables and fruits for my husband’s mom and we were off again without a worry.

Once at her house another five minutes away, we unloaded the vegetables and fruits, loaded ourselves into our white Toyota and headed away from her house to go grocery shopping which is our weekly routine on Saturday.  Not today. Just a block away, there was a thumping, a bumping and we stopped the car to see that we had a right front tire flatted by a large silver screw.

We called the repair shop and decided that my husband would put what he calls the donut tire on and that I would walk his ninety-two year old mother back to her house.  After I walked back to the car, I watched my husband changed the tire, using my body and hat to try and keep the sun off of him while he worked. After a bit of thinking, we decided that we would go grocery shopping after church on Sunday as the prospect of getting the tire repaired might take some time. I told my husband how fortunate we were that we were so close to his mother’s house and how fortunate for us that it was not raining and how fortunate we were not driving on Highway 101 with all of the summer traffic. 

We limped down the hill when there was more bumping and my sweet husband explained that he didn’t think that he had tightened the lug nuts on the wheel for the final time after he had taken the car off of the jack to lower the wheel back on the road.  He checked and sure enough, the lug nuts holding the tire were easing themselves off.  Once again, I thought how fortunate we were that we had not driven further and lost the nuts, the tire and ruined the new front brakes on the car.

My husband limped the Toyota on the back roads to our local tire shop after dropping me at home on the way and after waiting a couple hours, they told him that the tire could not be repaired and replaced it with a brand-new tire free of charge.  When he returned home and told me, once again we thought how fortunate that the flat tire was one of the older tires and not of the brand-new tires that he had put on the car two weeks earlier.

How fortunate, just two words but what a wonderful way to whisk your thinking quickly, painlessly into a moment of thoughtfulness, a spot of unexpected tranquility, a held breath of satisfaction.  How often, something unexpected happens to us without warning, a broken heel on a pair of favorite black shoes, a jar that cannot be opened so you have to change what you are planning for dinner, a favorite blouse that you cannot lay your hands on while getting ready for work so you reach for something else.  These are small things, the circumstances of my broken tooth over a month ago for me was a big, big thing but how fortunate that it broke off and fell into the sink while I was home, brushing and flossing in the comfort of my home.  How fortunate that my dentist was able to cemented back in on a Saturday.

After having experienced oral surgery this week, I can say once again how fortunate I am to have a doctor and his staff so well trained to take care of me, how fortunate that I was so well-drugged that I don’t remember a bit of the long drive home. As I sit here, typing waiting for myself to heal, I think again how fortunate I am in so many ways.  How fortunate, just two words but they might be just the ones you need today. 

Behind the Doors

Months ago while I was visiting a cousin in Idaho and was wandering about there with her, we went to a house to pick up a quilt that had been quilted by the woman that lived there.  It was a quilt made by my cousin’s mom for my cousin’s daughter who was getting married.  Due to the great size of quilt and time left for the project, the wedding quilt was taken to a quilting artist to do her magic.  My cousin’s mom who made the quilt would be finishing the edges.

I was surprised, delighted with the lovely quilts that were here and there on the backs of chairs, heaped upon the table which might have served as a dining table if the surface could be found beneath the swatches of fabric, threads and the various quilts.

I admired the various cotton colored fabrics that had been wrapped on a paper roll with the vast quantity of their companions now made into quilting art pieces. Ah, heart, slow your wild thumping in my chest and excuse me while I drool. Space and time to do all that you want to do, dream on, dream on.  

As an artist, I stink, as a quilter, I am a babe in the woods and the quilts I have made are simple log cabin patterns, simple blocks of color which I have made into warm articles to cover our beds.  I made a quilt for my son when he was quite young, I think that he was five or six years old at the time. I took him with me to select the fabric, explaining the need for a red color for the heart of the pattern. He was very solemn when he picked out the colors for his quilt.

I was quite surprised when my little son kept coming into the room where I worked on sewing his quilt in his grandmother’s house before going back out to play checkers with his grandfather or to read with his grandmother. I complained to my husband about his lack of interest and enthusiasm in what I was doing while working on the quilt for our son; meanwhile his son was checking on his mamma quite frequently. Thinking back on it, my son was continually asking when the quilt would be done whenever he came into the room as he was at the age of asking us frequently, ”Are we there?” Or, “Can we go a different way?” during our driving around town on errands or on long trips. I wondered if he still has the quilt as it went to New York with him so many years ago along with a blue knitted afghan made by his grandmother for his bed.

 

I started this little blog in September 2015 and today it is the beginning of August 2016.  Where has all of the time gone? I can look in my mirror for one of the answers, it went to getting more gray in my hair (I have stopped coloring it, though I only just started about two years ago coloring just for the novelty of it), I am getting closer to retirement and I have a great sense that maybe just maybe, I should adjust to allowing myself more time to relax, to breathe, to mediate, write and simply be.

  

Which is precisely what I am doing today.  I am taking vacation time off to spend the afternoon at home to do whatever my mind might choose to do.  Apparently, working on this blog is one of the items on the unpublished list in my cerebellum. As well as cooking up some garden peas and pasta for dinner. Ah, but back to this blog and the title “Behind the Doors”.  Curiosity is a gift and wondering about the world is part of that gift.  Behind every door is a wonderful or dreadful existence that so few of us can have a glimpse, a notion or a grasp of.

I have often thought about writing about the stories behind the doors or my idea of the life behind the stained glass door, the stark red door in the side of a blue house, the door hanging on one hinge banging in the wind. So many souls coming and going in this day upon day.  I know that when I was younger, I felt closer to the infinite divine presence which seems for the most part lost in my present day to day living.

Here is the story behind my door, I exist. I walk out the door, open another door into my car, drive away to still another door which I open with a wave of my badge to open yet other doors to walk into my office to greet other door openers who exist.

I can talk about the doors in my mind that open and close to reflect my mood, to contemplate what is going on around me but the other doors that are constantly opening and closing as well around me, I can never imagine.  But what a glorious spectacle is unfolding, what a miracle it is to be part of it.  Yes, most of the time I forget that part,that behind the doors is a miracle and I am still part of that miracle. 

             

Back in the Routine

Back in the Routine

“You either need to come and get me or I need my house key.”

I was in the kitchen getting a drink of water when the phone rang. My son who was visiting us from Brooklyn, New York was calling from a friend’s house. It was close to midnight.

“I have to get dressed and then I can pick you up.” I replied.

“Cool,” was the answering reply and my son hung up.

I donned my mommy’s hat, got dressed and removed my oral retainer.  I listened to the snores of my husband as I slipped out the front door.  I was thankful that I had left the car out of the garage and it was not raining buckets as it had been throughout the day.

I told my 31 year old son that he was lucky that I had been in the kitchen getting a drink of water and that I had had several hours of sleep so that I should be able to drive.  Fortunately for us, it was only an 8 minute drive back to our house as we live in a small town.  After I had crawled back into my bed still warm despite my absence, I realize how easily I had fallen back into my role as a full time mommy. 

I had spent a great deal of my time lately as a wife, a caregiver and grieving sister in the last couple of months.  The last was helping my husband after his surgery as his caregiver.  So it was only a matter of time before I lapsed into being a mommy again.  Somehow, once you have a child you never lose that aspect of your being.  It hides in your womb, it lingers in your heart and it nestles in the four chambers that beat sending blood throughout your body, the very same blood that once coursed through the growing mass that became a bouncing baby boy after a really great fun time in the hospital.

I am still waiting for the next stage in my life.  I am waiting for the writer to come forth, the one that will work without waiting for inspiration throughout the long night, the writer searching for her cup of coffee to help enabled the body and mind to continue putting words to a page hour after hour because she must.

I am definitely delusional as generally I head to bed soon after seven or eight o’clock in the evening, yawning, drooping and searching for my toothbrush and dental floss which at this moment has become a great feat of concentration.  Due to a crowned tooth breaking off at the gum line, I pay a great deal of attention to the flossing of my pearly whites while arming myself with my eyeglasses (all the better to see what I am doing) and all of the lights on in the bathroom and determination not to pop the tooth out again.  My dentist cemented it back in and said it was tentatively in.  Fear of smiling with my tongue poking through a gap in my tooth line has placed me in a very conservative state of mind.  Though my time with no tooth was very short and only overnight, I gained several insights.  I marveled at how soft the inside of my upper lip was.  It has been a stranger for most of the time as I have only explored the inside of my mouth with a quick swish of my tongue to check for left-overs. I found that the hole in the front of my mouth only looks good on a five or six year old. Having said that, I have become almost Zen like in my approach to food, carefully cutting up my egg sandwich so that I can shove it into the back of my mouth past the wounded warrior at the gate.  Each bite carefully chewed as my tongue guides and controls everything away from THE TOOTH.

I am definitely living in the moment.  It is quite like the slide back into the mommy mode that I experienced whenever our son is at home.   I enjoyed the mommy-ness. The doing that goes on, cooking, baking, sharing times of board games with my son and husband. It is the caring, the knowing that I am here for him, my moment with him is all that I have so I pay close attention.

The same goes for while I am eating I am enjoying the moment, savoring the flavors, the texture of everything while concentrating on guarding the tooth from further harm.  I instinctively do that with my son, catering to the possible wants and needs of his immediate world in our house during his brief stay.  I only have a short time to get it right, as his stays with us are brief.  As for the tooth, its stay could be brief as my dentist told me, “It is tentative. “  So I am back in the routine or at least another routine of really practicing being in the moment, remembering that a wrong step or in my case a wrong bite will leave me smiling at you with my tongue waving through the hole in the wall.

Back in the Routine

Back in the Routine

“You either need to come and get me or I need my house key.”

I was in the kitchen getting a drink of water when the phone rang. My son who was visiting us from Brooklyn, New York was calling from a friend’s house. It was close to midnight.

“I have to get dressed and then I can pick you up.” I replied.

“Cool,” was the answering reply and my son hung up.

I donned my mommy’s hat, got dressed and removed my oral retainer.  I listened to the snores of my husband as I slipped out the front door.  I was thankful that I had left the car out of the garage and it was not raining buckets as it had been throughout the day.

I told my 31 year old son that he was lucky that I had been in the kitchen getting a drink of water and that I had had several hours of sleep so that I should be able to drive.  Fortunately for us, it was only an 8 minute drive back to our house as we live in a small town.  After I had crawled back into my bed still warm despite my absence, I realize how easily I had fallen back into my role as a full time mommy. 

I had spent a great deal of my time lately as a wife, a caregiver and grieving sister in the last couple of months.  The last was helping my husband after his surgery as his caregiver.  So it was only a matter of time before I lapsed into being a mommy again.  Somehow, once you have a child you never lose that aspect of your being.  It hides in your womb, it lingers in your heart and it nestles in the four chambers that beat sending blood throughout your body, the very same blood that once coursed through the growing mass that became a bouncing baby boy after a really great fun time in the hospital.

I am still waiting for the next stage in my life.  I am waiting for the writer to come forth, the one that will work without waiting for inspiration throughout the long night, the writer searching for her cup of coffee to help enabled the body and mind to continue putting words to a page hour after hour because she must.

I am definitely delusional as generally I head to bed soon after seven or eight o’clock in the evening, yawning, drooping and searching for my toothbrush and dental floss which at this moment has become a great feat of concentration.  Due to a crowned tooth breaking off at the gum line, I pay a great deal of attention to the flossing of my pearly whites while arming myself with my eyeglasses (all the better to see what I am doing) and all of the lights on in the bathroom and determination not to pop the tooth out again.  My dentist cemented it back in and said it was tentatively in.  Fear of smiling with my tongue poking through a gap in my tooth line has placed me in a very conservative state of mind.  Though my time with no tooth was very short and only overnight, I gained several insights.  I marveled at how soft the inside of my upper lip was.  It has been a stranger for most of the time as I have only explored the inside of my mouth with a quick swish of my tongue to check for left-overs. I found that the hole in the front of my mouth only looks good on a five or six year old. Having said that, I have become almost Zen like in my approach to food, carefully cutting up my egg sandwich so that I can shove it into the back of my mouth past the wounded warrior at the gate.  Each bite carefully chewed as my tongue guides and controls everything away from THE TOOTH.

I am definitely living in the moment.  It is quite like the slide back into the mommy mode that I experienced whenever our son is at home.   I enjoyed the mommy-ness. The doing that goes on, cooking, baking, sharing times of board games with my son and husband. It is the caring, the knowing that I am here for him, my moment with him is all that I have so I pay close attention.

The same goes for while I am eating I am enjoying the moment, savoring the favors, the texture of everything while concentrating on guarding the tooth from further harm.  I instinctively do that with my son, catering to the possible wants and needs of his immediate world in our house during his brief stay.  I only have a short time to get it right, as his stays with us are brief.  As for the tooth, its stay could be brief as my dentist told me, “It is tentative. “  So I am back in the routine or at least another routine of really practicing being in the moment, remembering that a wrong step or in my case a wrong bite will leave me smiling at you with my tongue waving through the hole in the wall.

The Stuff that Dreams are made of

We don’t expect our dreams to fall into our waking moments however this morning when I woke up part of my dream followed me out with my foot.  I had been in the yard of my house, well, my dream house which had a large fence around it. A large wolf had gotten into the yard and I with the aid of my husband, we had been trying to chase it out of the yard.  I was kicking my foot out to shoo the animal away and that is when I woke up.  No, I didn’t connect with the wolf but with the wall of my son’s bedroom where I was sleeping as my husband was sleeping in the front room of our house after his surgery to be closer to the large bathroom.  I, in turn, was sleeping our son’s room to be close to my husband and the bathroom just in case he needed me.

Ouch, fortunately, my kick had been small and I didn’t even get a bruise from the close encounter with the wall.  When I told my husband, he asked me if I had put a hole in the wall of our son’s room. Hmm, am I wrong to worry about his concern about the wall?  Well, in the process of waking up, I also scraped the side of my nose with a fingernail.  Hazard to myself? Yes, there is a reason why my fingernails are so closely clipped. Otherwise, I will have to take to wearing mittens as the newborns do with their razor sharp nails.  Still, it might not be a bad idea as I could lotion my hands up at the same time.

Dreams are like opportunities, they are fleeting.  Moments lost, no, not really, as with some of mine they come back to haunt me sometimes.   When we were traveling to the valley to see my husband’s doctor for his ten day check-up, I missed an opportunity to take a picture of the train that was holding up traffic on the road so you will have to stay with me and just listen to my story. 

To begin with it, it wasn’t much of a train, but the barriers were down and all of the cars and trucks, etc. were stopped to wait until it was ready to pass by. In truth, it was just a large orange-red engine that had just come out of a large lumber yard on the right handed side of us.  A woman who was wearing a yellow caution vest and loaded down with a utility belt was busy with the wire fence gates, padlocking them together.  When she was done she headed for the engine and she must have gotten onto the far side of the engine because it soon started up and moved out of road and railroad barriers moved out of the way leaving us free to go. 

I mentioned to my man that it had been a lost opportunity to snap a picture that we could have posted on Facebook with the caption of “Our Long Train Wait”.  Which brings me to the commentary that we watched on CBS’s Sunday Morning today, March 6, 2016.   It was about selfies and how many people died each year from not paying attention of their surroundings as they strive to document whatever they happen to be doing at the time.  The woman giving the story commented how she missed what was happening with her daughter at a petting zoo because she was too busy trying to get the perfect angle and picture of her child’s adventures instead of just enjoying the moment. This is what opportunities are for, to experience something that we can in turn share at a later time.  She missed that with her child and will be unable to share the real experience of her day with her little girl at the petting zoo with other family members, friends and her daughter when she grows up and asks what things did I do, where did we go when I was with you when I was young.

My husband who is wise in the way of the world commented to me one day while we were watching the sunset off of our beautiful coast that we would miss the moment if we were too busy taking the perfect picture so we watched in silence, absorbing it all with our eyes, letting it be swallowed in the heart of our mind. Perhaps, in our memories, the exact position of clouds, the light and dark of the colors will be shadowed by time but if we hold still, we can remember the awe of the miracle. 

Taking the First Step

It isn’t always easy taking the first step but when things take a change in your life, you often have to step up to the plate, take a deep breath and try not to holler or scream.

When the man of my life was preparing for surgery, I was faced with the inevitability that I would be driving home.  I know that I am a good driver with years of experience but years of being married to a man who drives us most of the time everywhere plus the fact that I suffer from double vision when my eyes grow tired left me a bit anxious and concerned about the traveling home with a man under the influence of good drugs.

So I talked myself out of it.  I know that this does not work for some people who may need a lot of good medications to help their anxiety.  Fortunately for me, a good talking to generally does the trick.  Not to say that I did not toy with the idea of asking various friends to drive us or to come and pick us up after everything was done.

When we were driving home the next day after the man’s surgery, I told him that I was thinking of a blog.  His response, “It is not going to be about me, is it”.  I assure him that it might be a bit about him, meanwhile, I was thinking that it was going to be more about me and the battle of my various little minds fighting to get control of another event in my life.

Recently, I told a friend in the supermarket that I was at the point of just wanting to get off the world and let someone else take care of things.  It has been a busy, somewhat difficult couple of years. Not only for me but for various members of my family which in turn affected me in some various fashion.    

With the loss of our two cats, two sisters, a husband undergoing surgery, and new tasks at work, it is no wonder that I am tired. One of my sisters left quite quickly on her way to feed the chickens while a younger sister finally passed after a long illness.  I have been left injured but looking at my list, it is certainly a small one.  For some individuals, it could be considered a relative small list with simple things on it.  After all, we are born, we live and we die.

It is after all, how we handle it, how we react, how we respond to those in our circle, to those who are experiencing the same event.  Getting back to driving home after my husband’s surgery, my question was how I going to react and respond to the responsibility of getting us home safely.  Wisely, my sweetheart arranged for us to spend the night knowing that everything takes longer to get done than generally what is expected.  He was right, about after not being able to leave the hospital until dark. It was pitch black when I drove us to the lodging on the hospital campus.  I sighed thankfully when I checked in and saw two twin beds in our private room and a common living room and kitchen/dining area for all to use in the rest of the building.  Things were looking up.

 After my husband was settled in one of the twin beds, I parked the car, hauled in the luggage, the cooler with ice packs, grabbed my turkey sandwich and went to sit in dining room with a tall glass of water, and my cell phone. Ah, life in the fast lane. I unloaded the ice packs into the freezer of one of the refrigerator, placed sandwiches, muffins and four oranges, two bananas in our food bin as well. That was the relaxing part of my evening.

I can’t say that the rest of the evening and early morning was a blur nor did it go quickly. I set my cell phone alarm on for every four hours to administer the pain meds.  I would mention to friends later that it was like having a new baby as I would have to get dressed (to go out into the common room) about every twenty minutes to the ice packs in the freezer  so we could continue the icing per doctor/hospital orders.  Silly me, I had put on a gown for sleeping when I should have remain completely dressed for the duration of our stay.

Up and down, up and down all night.  Lucky me, poor little husband who wasn’t really sleeping either with the all of the icing of his wounds and taking his pain meds.  We survived and with lots of coffee for me we headed out in the morning.  Thank you, God, Goddess, Angels for the sunshine and dry roads home was all I had to say. 

I don’t drink coffee, I don’t like coffee but coffee was my friend that morning. My bosom buddy, my drug of choice and it certainly helped to quiet the various little minds that were trying to help me on the road.  Really, you are going to drive all the way home?  How much sleep did you get? I hope that your husband is able to direct you out of town.  Once out of town, another cup of coffee which I could not drink until I stopped at the rest stop when it was lukewarm and I downed it all down.  Yes, I am one of those people who cannot pat my head and chew gum at the same time.  I am unable to drive unless I have both hands firmly on the wheel, eyes ahead or checking my mirrors.  So hence, I had to wait until I stopped at a place where I could devote all of my attention to the cup of coffee turning colder in my hands. Ugh, coffee is really bad when it is getting cold.  But for a brain that it would make more alert, I was willing to drink it and then we were on our way.

Hooray, we made it home.  The man is healing, I slept that night 14 hours and let him deal with the pain meds to be taken every four hours. Taking the first step was letting him be responsible for self-care while I recharged.  Taking the next step may be harder, allowing myself to cry when I need to, to say uncle when I have had enough, to realize that I really can do it. 

As for the various little minds in my head, I told them to take a holiday. For I found that taking the first step was all I needed to do.