All day the sun shone in a blue sky and the smell of lilacs was intoxicating. They’ve burst into multi-colored firework-blossom bombs of purple and white and lavender beauty. The chestnut trees have candled and the bright multi-hued greens of spring are evening out into that solid summer wall of verdant emerald. I can’t reconcile myself to the fact that a friend is dying.
One of my FB friends who is also a colleague commented at work this week that he couldn’t believe how many books I read. “Do you REALLY read that many books? You read like one a day!” he exclaimed. “I don’t watch TV.* I read 139.5 books last year,” I replied, and left him gaping. I’m reading comfort books right now: just finished The Dark is Rising series and now have started on James Herriott’s All Creatures Great & Small. I suspect it’s because I need to find comfort anywhere I can these days, when worry fills so much of...
There’s always hope, right? In the bottom corner of the box, it sits and waits for you and springs up, as glad to see you as you are to see it, when you finally dare to lift the lid one more time. The hospital visit this evening went much better than I was prepared for and I feel so overwhelmingly grateful that maybe, maybe, hopefully, even if things aren’t looking up, they are at least looking a bit better for my friend who had been so steadily going downhill so fast this past week. It’s hard to feel anything but...
I’m too sick-at-heart to write much right now. Grief and concern and horror are like giant elephants lumbering around the room. Every time I turn around I’m struck again by how enormous they are, and how they just seem to have come out of nowhere and how they take up ALL THE SPACE around me. Too many friends going through too many awful things right now. How can these things be?? I have no answers and my cries to the universe seem to be falling on deaf ears. Perhaps if I try singing instead.
It’s the evening of the 3rd day of the 5th month of the year. It feels as though it was simultaneously just Christmas a moment ago and as if it is just around the corner. If the year continues at this speed, it IS just around the corner. Time boggles me, often. It’s so …heedless. It takes no heed. Had to stop and go look up the etymology of heed. It’s word that seems to get used a lot without people ever stopping, ironically, to take heed as to what it really means: it means “to pay attention, to give...
One friend started chemo today. Another starts chemo on Monday. A third has been extremely ill with something the doctors haven’t been able to identify and yet another has been struggling with a debilitating disease for quite some time. I don’t know how to be there for any of them. I don’t feel like I AM there for any of them. None of them live particularly near to me, though 2 are within an hour’s drive (1 of those is actually in a different country, however), but even so, I am feeling continually frustrated and upset with myself that I...
I’m missing people today. I’m missing places and the way we used to be. I’m missing old songs and old friends and old clothes. The beauty of spring is always pierced with sorrow: I so fiercely love and cherish every second of its too-ephemeral newness. I miss my family and my mom and god, my dad. Damn it, dad. I shouldn’t be missing you; you should STILL BE HERE. People move in and out of our lives, they flower and sprout in our hearts where the uprooting will hurt the most, and often we let them wither and fade away...
At book group the other night, we got on the subject of jokes and how they spread. Some of the joke trends that I remember most fondly from my own childhood are not a part of the Swedish culture at all, and introducing them to my children, especially to Martin who has the same sense of humor as I do and loves puns, has been fun for me. Elephant jokes and Why did the chicken cross the road jokes and the cannibal jokes we made up a few weeks ago: all very entertaining to the both of us. I get...
I had it in my to-do list to write a post tonight, but my shoulders hurt and my wrists hurt, and I suspect it’s partly from too much computer as it is, so I’ll just wave in passing and hope for better things tomorrow.
OMG! I bet you thought I was never going to get my diploma! Where the hell was I? Aaaah, yes, moving from Belgium to Germany! Back when we moved to Germany, there were US military bases everywhere, all over the freaking country. Berlin still had its wall, after all. There were so many other DoDDS (Department of Defense Dependents Schools) that our sports teams didn’t even have to play against any German schools, ever. My dad was stationed at Ramstein AFB, but we lived in Landstuhl which was where the military hospital and Army post were, and we went to...