I have some friends

I've been part of a group of women for, gosh over six years now. There are eight of us, and I've met not quite half of them face to face. Nevertheless, we are friends.

One of them has given me such good advice and counsel as I've gone through the whole broken pelvis situation. She's the one who told me when I'm getting irritable, I should probably stop and take a Tylenol because I'm probably in pain and it's coming out as cranky. She was (is) right.

Another knew, somehow and I truly don't know how but she knew, that I was struggling in the aftermath of the entire Kavanaugh mess. Even before then, she knew (again, I don't know how, this isn't one of the ones I've met face to face) that something wasn't entirely right in my world. And postcards started showing up. Postcards of dogs, kitties, one particularly amusing postcard of various bad posture, all with an encouraging but never saccharine note. This is the same woman who told me after we flooded in 2009 that it was OK to be angry or upset, that I was allowed a Job moment. 

With friends like this, I am rich. Truly rich. 

Just a few of the postcards

I can see clearly now

This is not a 9-11 post, although it is a post about living and dying.

My daughter-in-law ran a half marathon a couple of weeks ago, a really tough one in the heat at Virginia Beach. Partway into the race, she and her running partner turned the corner and saw an apparently fit man who’d collapsed. He was being given CPR, EMTs were on their way as was an ambulance, but it was not enough. He died.

My DIL wrote a very moving post about that event, the thoughts that went through her head when she saw him, and her struggle both that day and the next week to make sense of something so random and arbitrary.

Years ago I either read or heard in a sermon (don’t recall now which it was) something that made sense to me. Basically, the author or speaker said, until we come to terms with the facts of our deaths, we’ll have a hard time making sense of our lives. I took that to mean that if I want to live a purposeful life, and feel as though at the end of it all I spent my life doing things that matter to me, then I need to be deliberate in what I do and how I live.

As another friend of mine posted today (and I’m paraphrasing), you just don’t know if today’s the day you’re on the wrong plane or in the wrong building. I think J would agree – she’s comforted by her faith, and she’s aware now in a different way that yes, life is fragile and arbitrary. We don’t know when the end comes. Better to live deliberately and to enjoy the moments we do have.

I have a tattoo of a sun face. I got it in 1999 as I came out of a particularly dark time in my life. That tattoo was a permanent, visible commitment to myself that I didn't have to live in a mud puddle or stick around with negative, emotional vampires. About five or six years ago, I got it recolored; I want it to stay vivid. I always want to remember that commitment and even more I want to live it.

You're the one

My friend Jeanne sent me this inflatable rubber ducky.We've got a whole meme going about punching ducks and she pointed out that it's hard to punch a duck if you don't have one.

I wondered what the cats would think about it. Since Wally eats plastic, I thought there was a chance he'd just eat it, especially if I didn't blow it up. So I inflated it. Here's how they reacted--watch for Eddie's tail whip at the end:




Last night I left it on that chair while we watched some TV and it really bothered Eddie. So I moved it to the ottoman next to the chair and he was happier. Wally continues to stay away, and Chloe couldn't care less.

March is a worthless month

Dedicated to Jeanne, who hates February more than anyone I know.

I don’t mind February. It’s short month, even in leap year. Plus it’s got my birthday, a silly holiday (Groundhog’s Day), a federal holiday (Presidents’ Day) and a sappy commercial holiday (Valentine’s Day). February makes no promises about warmer weather, or sunnier days, you’ll hear no talk of plants starting to grow, or at least not usually. February deals you a straight hand—it’s winter, you’ll get snow or sleet or ice, or maybe cold, dreary rain. You won’t get false promises about spring coming in, or warmer weather or even very many sunny days. February plays it straight.

March is a different story. March is supposed to roar in like a lion and go out like a lamb thus leading to lovelier spring weather. Nonsense. What we get is more cold, dreary rainy weather and maybe snow too. Tiny little plants that may have finally poked through the ground run a real risk of getting blasted by frost here in New England or covered by a blanket of snow. And we have to put up with this month for thirty-one days. Then it’s April, where we’ll get slightly less cold dreary weather for another 30 days. Spring doesn’t show up around here until May, if we’re lucky.

Yes, yes, both my children were born in March and those are very good events to celebrate. They do help ease the pain (and honestly when they were born, I was too distracted by being a new mother to feel the full misery of March), but now that they are grown, it’s not like I can even really throw them a fun birthday party or anything. Nope, I get to suffer through the endless dreary month of March with no distractions. And don’t offer up St. Patrick’s Day either. That’s no holiday, it’s just an excuse for people to drink to numb the pain of this month.

It's raining today (of course), although the rain is supposed to turn to snow by 10 AM and we may get between one and four inches. Whatever, it's March and the weather is just going to stink. I'll be over sitting on the couch with a blanket and a book. Let me know when it's nice outside. 

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(Interesting useless bit of knowledge I found while tracking down the poem linked above: lamb used to be called spring lamb because you could only get it in the spring.)

Hoarding?

I realized I’m a hoarder. Oh not in the conventional A&E Hoarders sense—you won’t find piles of much of anything where I live and that’s not just because we lost so much. I tend to toss rather than keep and I’ll never be accused of being a pack rat.

Instead, when something I really love to use is running low and money is tight, I stop using that item and I hoard it. For example, I have a Clinique lip repair (fancy chap stick really) that I use because after decades of playing a double reed instrument, my lips are beyond dry. I’ve tried pretty much every lip product out there and this is by far the most effective. But at $25 a tube, it's not cheap. I’m running low so rather than going ahead and using it up, I’ve stopped using it.

I do the same thing with books. I bought an Iain Banks book in the spring of 2008 and didn’t open it until the summer of 2009.

Now I’m doing the same thing with a book sent to me by a high school friend. I haven’t even opened it—I’m hoarding it, and saving it for proper enjoyment. I will relish every single bit of this book from opening the package to reading every single word.

I doubt my version of hoarding will ever be shown on TV.