Be the Helping Miracle

Y’know, I don’t have a problem with ambulatory people. In fact, a lot of my best friends are ambulatory. They are all welcome to use the mugs and plates in the upper kitchen shelves that I cannot reach, but could you please check back in a couple days, after I’ve had time to run your dishes through the dishwasher, to make sure that someone tall enough to replace those dishes has stopped by and done so? Otherwise the counters get cluttered with dishes that are too high for me to put away. I never use them, which is why they’re up high. There’s this one cup that someone got down a couple months ago and it’s still down. It keeps getting moved around the counter, but it’s still down. I’m ready to put a post- it on it now, asking for someone who’s able to put it back up where it belongs. I think it’s been washed three times now since it was actually used. It’s beginning to be a bit of a game. 🙀

So, my ambulatory friends, when you’re visiting your wheelchair-bound friends, it would be really great if you could offer to do a few of those little things that they cannot do or would take ten times longer for them to do. It would mean a lot to them and would help them immensely. They might not feel comfortable asking for your help. Thank goodness I have a couple of friends who do this already. I keep hoping I’m not going to wear them out.

Most of the time when I ask for help, Ifeel like an annoying, dripping faucet. I used to be the person who helped people all the time. Now I’m the one who has to have help a lot. It wears you down. I mean it truly makes your soul weary to have to ask for help all the time. 

Count your ability to walk effortlessly as the huge blessing it is. It’s devastating to lose that ability even for a short time. Yes, eventually you adjust, and if you have unlimited funds, you can customize things. Plus, your upper body, if that part of you still works, gets really strong. I now have killer biceps, whereas, in my biking days, I had killer quads, calves, and glutes. 

If you haven’t lived it or been with someone who has, you probably wouldn’t think about all the ways people in wheelchairs have to figure out again how to do basic things. I know when I used to ride my bike to work near Seattle, I was shocked at how many curbs weren’t wheelchair accessible. I was delighted when King County changed that and went all out to alter every corner so people in wheelchairs could go out without someone strong to get them up and down the curbs. I bet most ambulatory people didn’t even notice. I’m not sure if it was my prescience that made me notice things like that or what. 

On my mountain bike, I just jumped the unramped curbs. Try that in a wheelchair and you’ll end up doing a face plant and not be able to jump up and pretend it didn’t happen. No, you’ll just be lying there, possibly bleeding, waiting for help. Me, I just don’t go out much. It’s too hard and too dangerous most of the time. What do I do if my motorized wheelchair breaks down? I do have a manual one but have you ever wheeled yourself around in one of those for hours on end? I wheeled myself around in one for hours on end for a couple of years. They’re slow, so crossing a busy street is scary, they can break down too. Try bending a wheel and see how far you get. 

Not trying here to whine or complain. Just hoping to open a few eyes. There are people all around you who are in compromised health. Don’t wait to be asked for help. Offer willingly and with a smile, and if they say no the first time, make sure they really don’t need help. They might just be hesitant about accepting assistance. If they are still in an angry stage, they might push you away, but don’t judge. They have been through a lot and might not be willing yet to forgive the world for their current state.

Try to be a blessing wherever you go. No matter what your current ability or disability. You do have something to offer. I can’t do everything I used to do, and what I can do may take a really long time now, but I can do some things again. More things than a couple years ago. Hopefully two years from now, I’ll be doing much, much more. 

For now, I can write and read and edit. I can speak and listen. I can even do some housework. No, I can’t clean my house from top to bottom. Especially can’t clean the top of the house. But I can do some things. I may not have the strength to do a lot every day, but I keep trying to do more and get better at it. Much like anything else in the world. Do what you can to help others. You never know when you’ll be the miracle someone else needed.

Once in a Pink Moon?

I'm 58, and until this year, I'd never heard of a pink moon. A blue moon, definitely, but I had never come across this expression even though I often look up lunar information because I love astronomy. The attached article notes that one might think that the pink moon is the kind of thing you'd associate with Barbie. No doubt Barbie and Ken's first kiss took place under one of these [insert snarky emoji here].

Apparently, Native Americans named this moon based on when a certain flower (moss pink or creeping phlox) begins to bloom. Now that takes awareness of the world around you. I can honestly say that I've never pondered the onset of one of the first flowers to bloom in spring and its association to the full moon, and I consider myself pretty aware of the moon and its cycles. I also loved watching the advance of spring flowers while I lived in Washington. All of that seems lost when you live in Florida where there seem to be flowers blooming all year around. While I grew up here, I was away for 25 years, living in other places in the country where there are four actual seasons. Those seasonal changes are very subtle (sometimes nonexistent) in Florida.

While living farther north, I got used to the cyclical movement of seasons. In Washington, it was so distinct and in sync with the calendar, you could almost set your clock by it. Autumnal equinox was accompanied by a swift shift in weather. September 20th might be summer hot, but come the 21st or 22nd, you could be guaranteed cooler temps immediately. Winter solstice similarly brought cold weather with it. March 21st-22nd saw warmer temps, Only the summer solstice didn't guarantee hot weather because it doesn't get hot for very long in Washington, at least not in the Puget Sound region.

I realize that electricity brought huge changes to the average household in the last century, but we have become far too distanced from the environment around us. I admit that it wasn't until in my late twenties, once I moved away from Florida, that I began to pay attention to the moon's cycles and started noticing the subtle and not so subtle changes in the seasons. I think this delay was partly due to the fact that if you live in Florida in the summer, mosquitoes are a big deterrent to spending hours outside at night,  being entranced by the moon and stars. Quite frankly, I have a hard time seeing the stars with all the light pollution coming from Orlando. I didn't even begin really seeing the night sky regularly until I moved to Washington. It was there that I first learned about the periodic meteor showers and began marking my calendar for nights to go outside and watch for the Perseid, Geminid, and Leonid meteor showers, at least.

I used to witness the Perseid showers in August when I lived in North Carolina and often traveled back and forth to Florida to visit my family. I drove at night to avoid the heat, and I was often treated to what I thought were "shooting stars," only to realize later that I had been watching Perseid meteor showers all those years. The level of my ignorance at the time embarrasses me now. I so wish someone would have introduce me to such celestial phenomena earlier on, but live and learn. That's my motto. It's a good day when I learn something new. That's one of the many reasons I love the internet. I not only have access to so much new information on a daily basis, I also have access to you, my readers, to pass on the information I glean and find interesting in the hopes that you'll learn something new too. Each one, teach one. Enjoy the pink moon. Cheers!

https://hellogiggles.com/news/pink-moon-meaning/https://hellogiggles.com/news/pink-moon-meaning/

Photographs and Memories

If you're like me, you probably have lots of old photographs somewhere that you take out once in a while to look at them.  I've been thinking about scanning them all so I can keep them in digital format, thereby freeing up a lot of storage space in my closet.  While I would probably keep a number of the actual photographs, there are a lot that I would discard, if I can possibly bring myself to do that.  I have thrown away a few photos in my time, but mostly because they were badly blurred or damaged prints.  I have a hard time for some reason throwing away a perfectly good photo of someone, even if I haven't seen them since high school and barely remember their name. Somehow they represent some little piece of myself--a memory, a long-ago friend, a classmate.  I don't know if I'm afraid that I will discard a bit of myself if I toss out the photo.  What else would cause such a reluctance to jettison excess clutter, given that I've been pretty vigilant in de-cluttering my life as well as helping others with that process?  Am I concerned that the discarding of the photograph means that I have let go of a memory I can never get back?  Is that necessarily a bad thing, to let go of dusty photographs and equally dusty memories?

While I don't have an answer for that, I can say that photographs can be invaluable in offering insights into our lives and our psyches.  I have recently been puzzling over what appears to me to be a recurring them in my life, and that is rejection.  It started with my father and his rejection of responsibility towards his wife (my mother) and their three children.  Not only did he never live up to his financial responsibilities, he also never lived up to his parental and emotional responsibilities.  I don't normally talk about my father, because as far as I'm concerned he was my sperm donor and that's all.  My mother left him when I was six months old, and I'm glad she did before he bashed her head in.  That's what he was working on the day she decided to leave him. He was throwing her against the wall while she was trying to breastfeed me.  

While that is certain to get the Freudians out there licking their chops and nodding their heads over the fact that I am lesbian, that's not what I'm processing at the moment. What I'm processing is the concept of rejection. I've dealt with this so many times, you'd think I'd have licked it by now, but it seems not. I distinctly remember forgiving my father for his rejection of his children. Not only did he not take care of us while we live together, but he also neglected to care for us financially for my entire life. I was six months old when I mom left him, and from that point on until I, the youngest of three children, turned eighteen, he gave us a grand total of one hundred dollars. That's it. When asked why my mother didn't press the issue legally, she explains that he would have simply vanished, and she's probably right.They didn't pursue deadbeat dads very hard in those days. So instead she worked full time for my whole life, leaving the three of us with babysitters or finally as "latchkey kids" long before they coined that phrase. So not only did I experience rejection from my father's inability to take responsibility for his actions and his children, but I also experienced rejection by default from my mother, who had to go to work instead of caring for her six month old baby and my two slightly older siblings.  

While my mother didn't purposely reject us, she did have to feed and clothe us and make sure we had a roof over our heads, which meant that she had to spend all day at work. Her parents came to live with us so they could look after us kids, which was really good for the few years they were still alive. That got us through our early years at least. After they passed away, we had responsible teenagers who were family members or close friends of the family who looked after us until at the ripe old age of nine, eleven, and twelve, we were on our own with only the retired couple from across the street keeping an eagle eye on us from their front porch or living room window. These precious folks became another set of grandparents to us. I know none of us will ever forget their watchful care, even though we got pretty good at giving them the slip and escaping out the back door and over the fence once we hit the teenage years.  

All this time on our own, from the time I was nine, led me to being pretty independent in the long run. While my two older siblings have stayed closer to the old homestead (i.e., suburbia), I ventured off every time I got a chance, beginning when I was thirteen when I spent my first summer with my granny in Kentucky.  Not only did I spend every summer I could away from home during my high school years, but I also spent a year of college in Tennessee, and the other three years in a town a little over an hour away. After college, I left home and never came back except for a two-month stint when I purposely quit my job at an opportune time and went home for the express purpose of spending time with my mom. I had known then that my granny was going to die, so I was in a better position to visit her and to drop everything to attend her funeral.  Had I still been living and working in Seattle when that happened, that would have been harder to pull off.  As it was, my best friend and I simply got in the car and drove up there to be with my family on that side and to bid farewell to my granny, an amazing woman who will appear again in my writings here, no doubt.  

When I got back and was getting ready to spend some time with my mom, she got a call from her old job, from which she had been retired for a couple of years, and I barely saw her again while I was down there.  She came home on weekends, but she was pretty tired from working all week, so we just spent most of our time together quietly, which was fine. During the week while she was gone, I spent my time with my brother recording my music CD, Driftwood: The Music.  In the evenings, I either spent time with my sister at her apartment or I worked on background vocals and harmonies by myself at my mother's house with my two kitties, who had come with me for that two-month visit. The irony of my mother being called back to work during the time in my life that I had set aside specifically to spend with her did not escape me.  I had to spend some serious personal therapy time on that one a couple years later when the theme of rejection came up again.  While I was down there, the woman I had been working on being in a relationship with, but who had no time to spend with me because her grown daughter and her boyfriend had moved in with her, broke up with me AGAIN a couple days before my brother and I were to finish my end of the recording.  

Let me back up here and fill in a few gaps are far as relationships go.  Being lesbian is not an easy thing at any time in history anywhere.  Being a lesbian in a conservative Christian community in the South is a recipe for disaster.  To begin with, I was in denial about it to myself, sort of. I didn't deny that I had a tendency to be attracted to close female friends. That much was pretty obvious. But I was in denial about living out and proud because I felt that I had been called into the ministry, to serve God as a teacher and leader of young people.  Ahem.  Not a good idea in conservative Christian circles if you are gay.  So until I left conservative Christianity, essentially my relationships were all doomed to end badly.  No matter how much I loved these women, guilt won in the end, and I lost.  

Then as I got out of those circles, my relationships began to last longer and therefore deepen. But alas, I suspect the damage had been done for me. I wanted my relationships to last, and I stuck with them until it was obvious that I shouldn't be there any more. I had two separate relationships that last for six years each.   Had the laws been different then, at least one of those would have involved marriage.  The other one, not so much because the woman had already been married once and was not interested in getting hitched to someone else. Both ended for reasons that won't be discussed out of respect for the former partners. While I was the one to walk away from both of these, it was only after the death knoll had been sounding for a while. Although I took the blame both times, it takes two to Tango and when one stops dancing, it gets really uncomfortable.  

That leads me back to the relationship that very nearly sucked my soul out of my chest and left me for dead.  Although I had a couple of brushes with perfectly good potential partners while I was in a couple of the out periods of this in and out, in and out thing we were doing, those were doomed from the beginning because I was in those days like the walking dead in some ways.  I recognized that I didn't have much to give because there wasn't much of me left.  It took a couple years of living on Puget Sound for me to heal from this disaster of a relationship.  I did finally heal, mostly.  I was healed, but I was still rather fragile.   Being the fool I am, however, I wasn't able to leave well enough alone.  At the end of the disaster of a relationship, I met a woman, that I can safely say turned my world upside down.  I wanted badly to be with her, but she was married.  So instead of letting go completely of the bad relationship that was really at that point only a nasty hangover, I clung to that dead corpse of the old relationship, as well as the excuse of this new women having a child, and told her that I wasn't interested.  

It's never good to lie.  Not to yourself.  Not to others.  I committed the worse kind of lie.  I thought about it long and hard and then lied to her.  Whatever the rationale, however altruistic, it was still a lie.  I should have at least told her the truth: She rocked my world, but I couldn't even think about being in a relationship with a woman who was married, no matter what the extenuating circumstances in that marriage. She needed to work on coming out to herself and the world around her, and everything that meant, and she needed to do it on her own terms, for her own reasons, and not because she had fallen for me.  AND I needed to protect myself from the fallout of everything she needed to do for herself before she could be with me.  I didn't tell her all those things, and I have regretted that to this day.

I'm not sure I could have articulated each of those things in the moment as well as I can today, but that's what it boiled down to, even though I blamed it on something else.  With that lie, I broke her heart, and I knew it would, even though I did think that it was better that she find her way without the pressure of having someone waiting in the wings.  Only now after we have been together on and off, while the divorce has painstakingly played out, she has broken mine, because all these years later, it has still come down to the same thing. She needs to have time to go through all she has to go through and decide if she is still interested in being in a relationship with me once she gets to the other side.  Apparently for some masochistic reason, probably the rejection theme, I had to stand by and watch her walk away with my heart in her hands. Eventually, she just walked away altogether and I had to let her go. 

Back to the photographs I've been reluctant to discard. I have a large photograph of my fourth grade class. Just before the photo was taken, my boyfriend at the time, we'll call him Robert since that was his name, broke up with me. We were going steady. Yes, I was nine, but love was important even back then. In the class photo, he is sitting grinning like the Cheshire cat, while I am for all intents and purposes sitting there with a broken heart, pouting. What an image to capture for my lifetime memory book. Yet it is very telling. It is a photographic representation for my whole life as far as love is concerned. Sad, but true.

A string of broken hearts is nothing to be proud of, but perhaps they are why I am a poet and a singer/songwriter. Perhaps they are responsible for all of the books I've written and published too. Is it a fair trade off for a life of love with one person? I can't say since I'll never know what that feels like. I do know now what it feels like to have loved someone for decades and to know that they have loved me for all those decades too. For larger reasons and greater purposes, we didn't find our way into a love relationship until late in life, but at least we are together now and I can finally heal that nine-year-old girl in the photograph. It's about time, wouldn't you say? 

No Phone? No Internet? No Way!

Wow! That was some trip to the past this morning. We've been having fierce thunderstorms lately. That is typical for Florida this time of year. A couple days ago, lightning crackled and thunder boomed right over my head. The power flickered but came right back on again fortunately. I thought we had narrowly escaped a direct hit to the house since all seemed well. Only the night before last, the internet went out in the middle of the night. I spent most of yesterday having hit or miss internet. Mostly miss. This morning I got up to no internet and no phone. Fortunately the cable was working so I had tunes for my music channels. Unfortunately for me, my housemate had moved it to the muzak channel. I had set it on the New Age one (i.e., the quaalude channel) before she left at o'dark a clock to go to a dr's appt in Kissimee. Why anyone make an appointment for 7:30 am when the office is an hour a way is anyone's guess. That's just wrong. Anyway, I awoke to frightful music and found that I had no internet...again. Plus no phone. Given my desperate state, which had to be kept to myself for an entire hour, I wheeled over to the foot stool that houses the telephone book. You may remember those things. They used to be indispensable, but now they merely come in handy a couple times a year. Otherwise they're used to keep that old table leg from wobbling. Unless you're in a big city. Then they are used to level the house. But I digress again.

So I was awake in a house with no phone or internet. The fact that there is no phone explains why it isn't ringing off the hook, thus allowing me to sleep in until 8.30 this morning. When I awaken, I attempt to call my girlfriend to inform her that I still have no internet, only to find that I will have to go in search of my cell phone in order to lodge this technology complaint. Then I roll over to the modems so I can be ready once I get through to Bright House. Just to be sure, I try again to reboot the modems since I know that's the first thing they'll ask me. Once through, the gal on the phone has to transfer me to the "Tech Support Who Knows More Than the Basics" department. I get a guy who is able to access a few more things remotely. It's a good thing they have the ability to punch a few buttons and find out things remotely because the tech guy on the phone informs me that if what he does doesn't work it will be next Tuesday before they can send a service person. Hmm. It's only Friday. Really? Seriously? Are you kidding me?

Of course, I go into full knees-to-floor prayer mode (only figuratively since I'm still in the wheelchair), knowing I may survive this trial but only barely. Fortunately, Archangel Michael (my tech guy) was on duty because the internet came back up and I lived happily ever after, and you get a mildly humorous morning post. Really. The things I go through just to bring you a morning chuckle. It's enough to make a cat yawn. Speaking of cats yawning, this full-blown crisis for me didn't cause even a ripple on their kitty kat seismic scale. They are happily slumbering while I work my way through their mid-morning nap. Nothing quite like a cat's perspective to keep you grounded. Now it's finally time to go get breakfast and my chai tea. Gotta hurry or it will be noon and time for my first telephone appointment this morning.

Shrinking/Expanding World

(Reprinted from my Mystic Angel Healing blog found at http://www.mysticangelhealing.com)

There is a universal principle that states that whatever you focus on expands. It's also been framed as the statement "Energy flows where attention goes." A great illustration of this principle is found in the experience of health challenges. Few things in life stop us in our tracks as quickly as a health challenge. When we suddenly have to focus on our bodies, or even a body part, our worldview will rapidly shrink to fit this redirection of our attention. Let's say for instance that you step funny and slip and fall, breaking your ankle or your foot. Suddenly your entire world telescopes to the region of your injured body part. Not just in the next few hours while you get to the doctor and get it set and casted, but your whole world will shrink down to figuring on out how to deal with the world with a broken foot or ankle in the process. Most of your attention in the days to come will focus on crutches and casts and keeping your foot elevated. While times in our lives such as these can provide needed down time, we must be aware of their potential to cause a permanent shift in our lives to the four walls around us. In this case, a shrinking of our world manifests in a smaller part of our world capturing our attention. The larger world shrinks while the smaller world grows in our awareness. In order to pull ourselves back from this shrinking perspective, we have to focus on it only as long as necessary to move beyond that stage in our lives. We can't afford to get mired there. If we do, we risk spending more time there than necessary. 

In recent years, I've had to focus on navigating different health challenges. Because of this needed change in the moment, I found that it began to impact me on a larger scale. A larger scale that kept reinforcing my need to shrink my focus. The more I focused on the smaller picture, the more life supported this refocusing and created more reasons to shrink my worldview. I suspect that if left unchecked, this shrinking focus could continue indefinitely until all I was left with was the existence of health challenges. In the beginning, the change in focus was caused by an extreme attack of vertigo that had been brought on by sinusitis. During this event, my worldview got very small and continued to be small as my needs in the moment changed. While living in a place of great and expansive beauty, I had to narrow my vision to what was directly in front of me in order to maintain my equilibrium. Eventually I was able to expand this view to cover more space. As that expanding view was reinforced by the world around me, I was able to cover more ground, eventually shifting my focus to driving across the United States in a pickup truck with my four feline children. Because of other mitigating circumstances, I shifted my focus inward and had to reverse my path and after a trip back across the USA, I reshifted my focus to recovering from that trip, which was accompanied by other health challenges that required me to continue narrowing my focus. Eventually my life became all about my physical challenges. That's pretty much where I am today. 

Only today my mind is opening up to the fact that this is something I can choose or not choose. I may not currently have my expansive view of Puget Sound right outside my living room window, but I do have windows to look out of that incorporate nature. There are trees and a peekaboo backdrop of skies out the main window that is my view. I can also open some windows onto other views and now is the time of year in Florida that it is good to open up the blinds and see what all is waiting out there. I suspect that looking will lead me to go explore what is out there, which will lead my feet to get on that path again. As soon as I put my feet on that path, there's no telling where it will lead me. Right now, my looking needs to lead me to get up out of the wheelchair I'm using right now for mobility and get my feet moving towards a future where dancing and walking and biking and standing strong while I do my yoga and tai chi routines is part of my daily experience again. Part of my daily expanding worldview. I hereby declare that my world has gotten as small as it is going to get. From this day forward, my worldview and accompanying life experience will be expanding again. Who knows? Maybe you'll be reading about my travels with my kitties again before you know it. 

Better Than Therapy

(Reprinted from my blog Mystic Angel Healing)

Combine Pharrell Williams' "Happy" video and Masaru Emoto's teaching about The Hidden Messages in Water and you get a recipe for changing your life by shifting your mood that's better than hours of therapy and a lot less expensive. I have actually played some of the videos that repeat the song for a full hour while a series of different people dance to the song. It illustrates that moods are contagious. It is definitely an argument for hanging out with happy, well-adjusted people and for listening to upbeat music. I could tell the difference not only in my emotional state but also in my physical state. After listening to the video even a couple of times activated a mood shift. After an hour of it, I was downright high from it. Plus, I felt better physically. 

So next time you're not feeling well or happy or strong, try listening to that song a few times. After a while, you'll have it hard wired into your brain and find yourself playing it in your head even when you're not actually playing it. You'll be amazed at how much it affects your outlook and even your physical state of being. You are exposing all the cells in your body to the words happy and happiness dozens of times. It definitely has an amazing effect. I suspect that we have Pharrell to thank for changing the mood of millions of people around the world. Stand back, anti-depression drugs, the "Happy" song is the ultimate mood elevator and there are no known side effects. Pretty soon all we'll need to do is take two views and call a friend in the morning to pass on the happiness.

Giving Thanks for Burnt Toast

Most of the time my life is really good and fairly peaceful. During the years I spent living on the Kitsap Peninsula in Western Washington, I'd described it as "idyllic" for at least three quarters of the time. I lived for about five years either on the banks of Hood Canal or Puget Sound. The cabin where I lived overlooking Hood Canal accorded me jaw-dropping sunsets, while the house on Puget Sound yielded stunning sunrises, both of which I spent countless hours admiring, photographing, and capturing in prose and poetic writings. While I haven't been living at that level of serenity a lot of the time since I relocated to Florida, I still have a fairly peaceful and pleasant life, that is, until recently. Some time in the fall, the wheel of fortune began slowly turning me upside down. It finally ended in a dramatic turn that landed me suspended in air hanging from my toes. I'm glad to say that is starting to change. Things have shifted enough that I know that the wheel of fortune is moving up and about to smile on me again.

Since this blog is called, Slices of My Life, I'm entitling this entry, "Giving Thanks for Burnt Toast," because it is about finding the silver lining in one of the worst slices of this life oft examined. Seldom is my life aptly described such, but recent days and weeks it has made me wish I could chuck it in the trash, since no amount of scraping with a butter knife seemed to do anything towards making this slice any more palatable. While it hasn't been terrifying it has been, in so many ways, quite odious. I'm way past ready to cut my losses and move on now. While nothing that has occurred has been horrific by itself, it has been the combination of so many little things, with a few big things added to the mix, that has made life barely tolerable.

I'm disinclined to list all the things that have gone wrong in the past few months, because I prefer to focus on the positive aspects of my life. Bearing in mind the adage: "What you focus on expands," I am finished dwelling on all the stuff that went awry and looking instead at those things that remained steadfast. First of all, while I have been working to help all of my cats and my housemate's cats recover from a recent fungal infection that impacted each of them to a varying degree, I am grateful that they are all young enough to weather this and arrive on the other side in tact. I wondered for a while about one of them in particular, but he is now doing so much better that I know that he is very close to being back to his perky and lovable self. Despite it all, I am happy that they are alive and that our love for one another remains. They'll forget (eventually) all the times I had to capture and corner them for the application of medicine. They'll remember the love that drove me to do it (hopefully). Even though they have eluded me dozens of times during these medicinal moments, I will remember the times they allowed me to catch them so they could be treated. I know they allowed me because I know firsthand what Houdini cats they can be.  Bear in mind that these four cats and I drove from Orlando to Seattle, from Seattle to Minneapolis and back, and finally from Seattle to Cape Cod, and then back down to Orlando again. We have been through a lot together and know each other well. There is a lot of love and trust amongst us. For that I am very grateful. I am also grateful for the help my sister and her nephew gave me in getting the house sanitized to help with the recovery process. Sanitizing our living space was important to keep them well once we got them there.

Another thing I'm thankful for is having a roof over my head and a place to live where I can stay mostly warm and dry. One room in the house has sprung a leak recently, and getting someone out here to fix it has been not only a challenge but an act of futility. Technically we started calling roofers to repair it back in the summer, but no one ever came out. During the rainy season, this is not too surprising, but in the fall and winter, there's no reason not to be able to find someone to do the job. This should be their slow season. However instead of dwelling on the one room in the house that needs repair, I celebrate the other 90% of the house that is dry and cozy. Someone will show up eventually, and in the meantime, I'm grateful that this is the dry season. I also feel that we are fortunate for discovering the leak during the dry season so we could have it repaired. We had been warned that it was likely to leak, given the way the original job had been botched, but we didn't actually spring a leak until a couple weeks ago. So I'm thankful for the timing of the discovery of the leak so we can get it taken care of long before the next rainy season returns again.

I'm also grateful for the progress I have been making towards better health and mobility. I have made great strides towards reclaiming my strength and health. While I've had to start using a walker to get around, I've graduated to one with four wheels and a seat, so I can do more. Not only can I stack things I need to move from one part of the house to the other on that seat, but I can also start a task and know that if I get tired, I can always sit and rest before finishing it. That empowers me to attempt to do more, which keeps me active. That is really good for keeping up my strength and muscle tone, but it also encourages me by making me feel that I can still contribute to the upkeep of the household. The kitten and kitty rides have been worth the price of the chariot alone. Six of the nine cats in this combined household have allowed me to give them a ride at one time or another. So I'm thankful that I'm getting stronger and that I'm able to use this helpful aid to get things done and entertain kitties all at once.

While there have been lots and lots of small and large annoyances of late, I know that "this too shall pass." I have finally been able to stop struggling against the current and instead go with the flow, knowing that there may be moments when I need to be mindful of the rapids and hold my breath when I feel myself going under. During less stressful moments, I've been able to lift my head and look around, momentarily enjoying the scenery as it passes by rapidly. There have been a few moments of grace and laughter, as well as an awareness that this kind of testing is rare and that some good will come from the difficulties themselves. Even in the case of burnt toast, the charcoal from the burnt bits is purifying to the system. Why do you think they use charcoal in water filtration systems? It captures and draws out the impurities, so even the trials themselves work towards our growth and benefit. I may not be able to discern those benefits right now, but in time I will. I usually do, although sometimes it requires a lot of time. While I'm waiting for those revelations, I will give thanks in faith that somewhere some time, I'll understand the whys for the circumstances. I'm already figuring some of them out now. While I'm not likely to say, "Pass me some more burnt toast," I have at least swallowed the serving I already had and lived to talk and even smile about it.