By the Dawn's Early Light

Unlike what we have had today, the bombs are now bursting in air around here. Today only firecrackers were banging and cracking, but tonight the rockets are really glaring on the water of the lake and sizzling through the neighborhood. Because any blade of grass that is still standing is as dry as tinder, it will be a miracle if the houses make it through the night without being burned to ashes! Wichita Falls is under strict water rationing because of this extended drought. The city has even decreased the water pressure to conserve water since our lakes are at less than 50% capacity. And Lake Wichita where our house is located has golden algae so that the fish are dying without the oxygen they need to survive in this heat. But folks can still buy and blow up anything they can light a match to at this point. Yes, it is the Fourth of July, but for the critters and for a few folks like me who don't trust others with dynamite, we look forward to seeing the dawn's early light!

Following Hope

When things are looking mighty bleak or just plain sad, it helps to look ahead or otherwise find new horizons.   A friend of mine is dealing with some rather large changes in her life and one of our children finds himself wanting to look ahead to a less constricted and limited lifestyle. In my way of thinking, a type of hope can be found in travel or in looking for other places to live--whether in imagination or in reality. So, I have invited my  friend to visit Texas and look over some of the scenery. Now I can't give the child a different outlook as easily other than to tell him that the place he is dreaming about DOES exist, even if we don't own a piece of it. We at least know some folks who live there and maybe they will invite him out to visit.

One of the things I have learned about lately is the reason for bus loads of old folks--widows, widowers, and older couples who don't do much driving--to be found on the highways and byways. It is the simple need to get away from the same four walls for a bit for a change of perspective, attitude adjustment, or just plain fun and companionship. We get pretty dadgummed stale sitting here day after day on our tails. If you don't believe me, just ask any activity director in any nursing home or senior retirement center. Folks need a change of pace from time to time. The same can be said of folks who work day after day at any job. Vacations simply are not enough time to really help a working man take a breather--even if he has two weeks and plenty of cash to spend. Old folks don't take vacations. One day is about like another in their lives. Whoopty big doo...Pretty hard to look forward to the weekend when it looks the same as Monday or Wednesday except for lack of mail.

Back when my parents were going through this period of life, they told me about all the farms they "owned" at different places in Texas and about all the chickens and cows that they were raising. I understood that they  were dreaming about being in different circumstances without the work and other hardships that go along with living in the country. Then many days during the hot summer or the coldest frozen winters, Dad would say how happy he was that he did not have to take care of any animals or cut ice on the tanks for them to have water. Reality is not nearly as much fun as our day dreams. But day dreams are an essential part of our lives, in my opinion. The dream of visiting Normandy and Whithorn in Scotland are two of my latest dreams. And then, if it is possible, I want our daughter to get to go with me to see the Louvre in France. Two women turned loose in France to see the sights! We should have a ball!

One of these days the world may fall down and gasp to have peace and prosperity for all its inhabitants. That will probably be the day that Christ Himself will walk this earth again. Until then, we can only follow the hope that we can imagine for ourselves. Anything as big as peace just seems more than unrealistic!

The Day Will Come

The Day Will Come

I knew—I knew the day would come

That you would leave me here alone

I knew—but I didn’t think

About the pain, the deep hurt

I would feel every day

At every turn

You left me with memories—good ones

And I realized at the time we lived

Together we made good loving

Good memories, good for us

Good for the grands

Even good for those who knew us

The waitresses come and hug my neck

The woman at McDs smiles twice—she knows

Even Mother remembers and talks of you

And Dad asks if all the machinery works well

Not that he could fix it—but he asks in your place

For you—he misses you, too

The house is quiet, too quiet—no squeaks

No footsteps down the hall

I only sit in your chair once in a while

But the cat and the dog still need

To be touched, reassured

They still need to be loved—like me

The day will come—I know it

My tears won’t happen as often

Or as unexpectedly—but the memories

I don’t want them to stop—ever

I still love you—always will

"Old-Fashioned" or Just Old?

Blogger has decided to change the way we get into the new posts, and I have a considerable amount of difficulty remembering from one time to the next how to start a new post without the 'old' interface. Eventually I will either have to learn or have to change where I blog. But I am probably the only 'old fart' to have this difficulty. It seems that every person I see of any age is running around with an i-phone or some new technological wonder in his or her hands. My new phone does have a camera, and I can manage to send pictures to the children's phones. That is at least an improvement. The phone has a slide out keyboard, so I can also text. Glory be!

It is almost--almost nearly, that is, funny that the 6 and 8-year-old grands know more about technology than their grandmother. I sent a picture of our parents to my brother the other day where he lives in Arkansas. His older neighbor gets a big kick out of the little gizmos and phones, so he showed Sterling how to get the pictures that I sent. Sterling is a bright guy who is very versatile in just about every area of life, but computers are just not his cup of ---well, not instant coffee, for sure! His grandchildren would be happy to show him how to use his phone--if he could stand having them 'teach' him about the features.

If one of our grandparents or great-grands were to suddenly come to life in this world, not only would the area we live in appear totally different, but the technology would be just as strange as the landscape. Over 50 years ago, this area had some rivers and trees and a few main roads. Now we have roads, fly-over bridges, expressways, and frontage roads that would boggle the mind of our older generation. And then there are the 'planted' trees and shrubs in all the medians. Flowers were a nice touch in some of the yards of the wealthier folks along Silk Stocking Row, but not in the middle of FOUR lanes of traffic! Roads like Southwest Parkway with three separate lanes going each way would be just about scary for the older generation. Of course, when I drive in the DFW area, it scares me today and I am accustomed to the traffic and new roads. So maybe it isn't just the roads that are scary. The speeds alone would make a normal person a bit nervous, but on the highway where folks run 80 and 85, it truly is frightening!

Once upon a time we thought the local K-Mart was a BIG store. Now we have a super Walmart with everything from bird seed to oil changes. One of our grands made the comment that a person could buy anything at Walmart except a real live chicken or a bathtub. Give them time....They already sell live fish. But truly things are changing as quickly as our needs have changed. However, I wonder if we really 'need' all of these things sometimes. Our daughter walked down a sale aisle with me one day and there were some little plastic handled sponges on a rack. We both looked at them and then laughed. The purpose of the little sponge was to remove the lint from the dryer vent screen. How do WE do it? We lick a finger and run it over the lint and ball it up before tossing it. The little plastic sponge was priced at 50 cents. Jenn giggled and said she now knew she was using a 50 cent finger swipe each time she removed lint from the dryer screen. Some technology is just not worth the trouble it would take to use it. And a person does not have to be old to understand that concept.

New NORMAL?

A friend of mine who has been through some grief and mourning in her life told me that I was on a journey to find my "new normal" right now. But she did not tell me that the pain would stop any time soon or that I would stop bursting out in wild weeping at the drop of a hairbrush. The grief counseling classes I have attended so far have reassured me that I am not totally crazy, but I am still shaking with some kind of fear that I will make the wrong decisions--and I never seem to be sure that I am even making decisions until I have already done something. Now, that may not seem very clear, but let me present an example.

Monday I took our Dickerson grandson to Bowie, TX to meet his mother so that he could begin his music lessons the next morning. Then I returned to Henrietta and visited my parents for about 30 minutes at the nursing home. That was not too difficult. Then I headed on over to our doctor's office to ask him to help me with the muscle spasms and pain that just about makes me miserable right now. Even though I am not sure it is a pulled muscle that seems to be causing the pain from my head down to my hips and slightly below, something has to give! This kind of pain won't quit until it is either deadened with pills or until something makes me go to sleep. So, now I am dependent on something to kill the pain. Is that a decision? Even though I have seen the chiropractor and she told me that my muscles are tied in knots, I somehow feel as if it is my fault--that I am to blame for the pain! Go figure.

And then there is the king-sized problem of buying a new mattress, box spring, and frame. It will be expensive. Even though I have the money, it was never our habit to just go buy something without a thorough consideration and lots of shopping around. So, tomorrow before the youngest son gets here on Saturday, I will do the 'shopping around' part so that will already be done. I can compare prices and find out which stores will deliver and carry off the old mattress--for free or otherwise. When Fang and I bought the one we have now, it was on sale and not very expensive. We should have known better when the delivery guys told us to turn the mattress regularly or it would develop 'valleys' in it. Oh well. Live and learn.

But the question remains in the back of my mind that it might not really be necessary to change out the mattress just because my back is killing me. What if it is "just" stress? A new mattress might help, I suppose, but should I do that just because I am currently hurting so badly? See, decisions--even when prompted by well-meaning children--are not easily made at this point.

If a woman who has been through this process of grief and mourning finds herself crying again after four or five years, how can I expect to go shopping without crying about things after less than a month after Fang's death? So far I have managed to go to Walmart without crying the last few times, but the first time I went alone...well, it is a good thing no one I knew saw me and stopped to chat. I probably would have blubbered all over the person.

Next Thursday would have been our 44th wedding anniversary. I guess the new mattress will just have to be our anniversary gift to me. Now if I can just sleep on it without crying through the mattress protector....

ALMOST FOUR WEEKS

On the 18th of May (2012) I became a widow to go along with the other titles I have had over this lifetime. This was definitely not one I sought or especially appreciate, but it is so true that it is better to have loved and lost someone as kind as Lewis was, than to never to have known true love. While I attend grief counseling classes and try to spend as much time as possible thinking about positive things and staying busy with the kids or grands, each day brings reminders that he simply is not here in quite the same way. I hear him in my head telling me 'That's the way to do it' or something of that nature. I make my decisions based on how we lived together for all these years. After nearly 44 years, my mind is part and parcel with the way he thought and did things. I don't regret that in the least.


In 2010 I wrote a book called Destinations and had it published at SlightlyCreaky.com, and now it is an e-book on Amazon available as a Kindle book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0089E41MW  I know Fang would have wondered why I waited this long, but I had to re-read and edit it before I was satisfied. Also, my brother finally was here and read the manuscript and thought it was as good as any he had read. SO, I finally sent it in. One of these days soon I will see about getting it published in print. I personally prefer a printed book, but I am learning to enjoy the Kindle our daughter and her family gave me for either Mother's Day or my birthday. That entire month is a bit of a blur. We have several May birthdays. Jennifer had her birthday on the 17th of May and her daddy managed to wait until 12:30 to actually die on that night so it was May 18. He probably planned it that way, knowing him. He had us give ourselves a birthday party while he was still able to watch us and celebrate with us. Then, after Jennifer had gone home and was still feeling terribly weepy after his death, he came to her bedside in a dream and talked to her. She knew after that 'dream' that everything was going to be ok.





I suspect that my next book may be about grief--not mine, necessarily, but the mechanism and how grief and mourning are so very different. I had never in my entire life realized how totally draining grief could be--even before someone actually dies. When my brother and I had to put our parents in a care facility (read nursing home), we both were grieving the loss of our parents as we had known them. It has been nearly two years now, and we still MISS our parents even though they are still alive and in the same place as they were when we left them there. Parts of our life are just supposed to always be there for us--whether or not the people in it live in memory or in fact. Some of us who are older look back--not with longing for those days when we were young enough to jump fences, but for the attitudes that allowed us to easily love the times and the people we knew then. Oh, it would be wonderful if I still had the toned muscles and the bravado to take a horse over a fence, but now I would just love to have the courage to be able to face each day that comes my way without feeling as if I am all alone. Oh, others are here and around. But the love of my life no longer tells me how much I mean to him each morning and every night. Maybe in another four weeks, or four months, or four years...No, I will always miss him. Time is not going to change that. And maybe that is a good thing. Imagine how much God must love us to allow us to learn how to enjoy life with another person so closely that the person's absence makes life feel incomplete! After all, we are incomplete without God's love!

Communicating or Just Sayin'

Lately my dad has called our phone on an average of three or four times a day. He has a hearing aid and might be able to hear some of the words if I care to shout them. The phone we have in his room at the nursing home has the amplification turned up to the utmost. It's quite possible that the nurses down at the central station can hear me when I try to tell Dad something. However, Dad always asks Mom if she heard what I said, and then he promptly tells me again that he can't hear a word I am saying so I will just have to tell Mom. This type of so-called conversation has prompted me to turn on the answering machine and the 'do not disturb' feature on our phone. It is impossible to communicate over a telephone when one party cannot hear--or won't listen.

Now Fang finally decided to get a hearing aid for both ears when he kept having to wonder what the grandchildren were saying to him. Mind you, he could manage to ignore whatever I was saying. In forty-three years of marriage, he has probably heard whatever it was once or twice already. But it has been nice to know lately that he can hear me when he has his "ears" on. Being ignored is one thing, but being told that I haven't said anything to him all day is something else again.

Over the years we have come up with a fairly good way of handling decisions around our house. I talk about things and make plans; then Fang decides what HE wants to do and does it. It may be a little one-sided on the decisions, but at least one of us is usually satisfied. This might not sound like a good form of communication, but it has worked wonders for our marriage. If a mistake is made by the decision maker (guess who), the other party can smile and say (or think), "I told you so." As I said, at least one party of the first part gets to be satisfied.

Now communication is supposed to be a two-way situation. At least that is what most folks take for granted. And perhaps it is just as true for my parents as it is for Fang and me. One of us talks away while being ignored--in both situations. Tonight my dad left a message on the answering machine telling us that they are ready to go home. It was so easy to erase the message. Now if it were as easy to get it across to Dad that he IS at home where he currently resides, then maybe we could just talk about the wonderful fall weather and the recent rain. Somehow, ignoring his message happens to be much easier than ignoring the fact that he wants to go home. Children--at least Dad's children--were reared to try to please their parents and do whatever they asked of us. Not being able to do what they want of us is just as hard on us as it is on the parents not to get what they think they want.

It may be that in the future our children will have to tell us to just be still and stay in the car, chair, bed, nursing home, or wherever we need to be. It is NOT easy being the child who has to tell a parent what to do. When children have to 'parent' the parents, it is awkward at the very least and emotionally trying at the best. It would be wonderful to be able to just do for them what they have always done for us without all the complications of personality and stubbornness. And maybe that is possible for some children and parents. Maybe God will bless our children so that Fang and I can be less of a problem and more like old friends who live in someone else's house. But since one of us likes to talk and the other likes to make the decisions, who knows what kind of problems we will make for others. Maybe the kids won't put a phone in our room--just sayin'.