Una Semana
Muy Dificil
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The first
week in October is always a difficult week for me. It marks the anniversary of
the death of my baby. He’d been alive that morning. He died that night when he
was born.
Still a girl
myself, I’d been married only a year and a half. My family did the thing they
did best. They hid away all the pain and hurt. I thought that is what everyone
did. Stuffed the grief into a hole and covered it with concrete blocks. Or
heavy weight of a sort.
Of course,
over the years, the pain, still alive, periodically exploded through the
concrete, generally in inappropriate ways, cutting and bruising anybody nearby,
causing me even more grief.
Eventually,
with professional help, I learned to look head-on at my hurts and deal with
them in healthier ways, knowing they never go away.
Yes, this
past week was difficult. Grief came calling. We had cups of tea and fresh
bread. Examined the scars. Talked about things. I held my baby whom I never got
to hold in my arms.
Painful,
certainly, but I didn’t have to wallow in it. I looked for balance. There is
always balance. Some days it is harder to find than other days, but it is
there, waiting for me to see it.
I canned
tomato/apple catsup. Neighbors would ask me how many jars I put up. Enough, I
answered. I didn’t count them. I made one batch for give-away. I took around a
jar for each neighbor.
Living here
where every food is fresh daily, I’ve not much need for canning. But pickles,
jams and a decent spicy catsup are not available in our little town. So I make
my own and enjoy the making and the eating.
I sat on the
patio a lot, reading, visiting neighbors, reading, just sitting, reading.
More than
the usual number of bed-sheet butterflies wafted by. They comfort me, make me
smile, always. That’s my name for them, not the scientific name, but when you
see one, that’s what you’d call it too. They are huge, flap those big white
wings like sheets on the line in the Montana wind.
I put away
my sewing projects and dumped the pieces of a new puzzle onto the table. Crin
gifted me this puzzle. She knows I like difficult jigsaws. When she told the
cashier she was buying it for a good friend who loves puzzles, the cashier told
her that maybe when I tried to work this one, I’d no longer be her friend. We
laughed.
I’m still
her friend, but holy smokies, I see the point. This mess is very monochromatic,
a line drawing, crowded, not much to differentiate one section from another. I
still have five missing edge pieces and I’ve fingered every piece numerous
times. With luck I’ll finish by Christmas.
The
government clinic in town has flu shots this week. Went and got my jab.
Leo drove me
to Oconahua to visit Ana and Michelle. I had made some large hot pads for their
barbeque table, took them some jars of tomato/apple catsup. Michelle always
brews a cup of her special cappucchino for us. We tell more stories of
ourselves, laugh, get angry at the same foolishness, laugh, gossip, laugh,
trade garden secrets and laugh.
We’ve got a
bobcat roaming the place. I don’t know if that affects to the balance or not.
But the wild feline adds to the excitement. He or she marked territory out by
my avocado tree the other night. I recommend you avoid bobcat urine if
possible. Made me sick to my stomach.
Lola The Dog
somehow had sense enough to stay hunkered in her Dog Mansion and never even
whoofed. Snowball next door, a tiny morsel, is still alive and all Janet’s cats
are still catting around.
Hurricane
Orlene covered us with heavy clouds and never brought us a bit of rain. It’s
hard to judge which side of the balance scale that sits on. Depends on
perspective, I would say, but don’t most things?
Life
surrounds me, life for the living woven with memories of those gone on. As
Julian of Norwich said, “All shall be well. All manner of thing shall be well.”
Sondra
Ashton
HDN: Looking
out my back door
October,
first week
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment