West Virginia gets SO much rain! It just pours for days at a time here and while I love the sunshine, the lush green foliage and the rush of the creek outside my bedroom window is delightful.
Yesterday morning, I drove to town to meet my high school girlfriends for coffee. On the way in there was a sign warning “One Lane Road Ahead”. In West Virginia, that means one of three things…a downed tree, a rockslide, or half the road has washed away and you’re left to cross what’s left, holding your breath that the rest doesn’t give way with the weight of your car. Fun times! Fortunately, yesterday was just another rockslide. This one was right where the other one was that I received the warning about. But…this one was HUGE. I’m not sure you can tell, but that rock is about the size of two pickup trucks! Wowza! Ever since “the warning”, I’ve been hyper-vigilant about rocks in the road.
Four days. Four full days. That’s what it took to get that old laptop of mine to do what I wanted to do. Last year it only too two days. Of course, I didn’t actually DELETE my account last year. When I went to bed Thursday night, I said a prayer. “God…I’m going to get some much needed sleep here. Can you work in my head and help me figure this out?” I got up yesterday morning and made coffee then sat down in front of that dreaded instrument and said, “OK. Today it’s you or me!!!” Suddenly a screen popped up and said, “Your antivirus protection is out of date!” In small print it listed the things this could cause including…making your computer run slow. Seriously? Seriously?!?!
As I sit here writing this, Norah Jones softly crooning in the background, coffee by my side, I can hear the rumble of thunder in the distance. Another band of storms are about to pass through…the third today. A pair of mourning doves are foraging around beneath the feeders, unfazed by the approaching rain. Finches cling to the thistle socks hanging on shepherd’s hooks and the bright red flash of a cardinal swooping in catches my eye and makes me smile. They say cardinals are an indicator that angels are near. If that is true, the angels visit often because the cardinals are always here.
I will bet dollars to donuts that if you scroll back through this blog, every year at this time you will see the same post. Maybe not the same exact words but it’s always the same topic, anyway. I have now spent two entire days working on the computer trying to get my finances together so I can do my taxes. I can guarantee you…the taxes will take 20 minutes. The prep work? Days and days and days. Why? Well…my finances are on an old laptop for one thing. It has plenty of space on it, but it isn’t very compatible with the upgraded financial software and becomes even less so with every subsequent download. While trying to make it communicate with my bank, I inadvertently deleted my entire checking account with fifteen years of transactions. Oh. Em. Geeee. I nearly died. I had the backup but couldn’t get the program to accept it.
I had a list a mile long of things to do yesterday. It was my errand day…chiropractor, breakfast with a friend, a two hour pamper-me session at the spa, a two mile walk with a salad at the end, again with a friend. In there somewhere I stocked up on cat and bird food at Rural King. Oh, and I bought a gallon of milk on the way home. Hey, I didn’t say it was going to be a stressful day!
I have lived every moment of the last five months with this image in my mind. Not that I didn’t try to stay mindful and present this winter…I did. But, this…this is what my brain screams for from the moment the first frost withers the life from the foliage in the fall. My body yearns to sit here in the sunshine, listening to the deep tones of the wind chime in the gentle breeze, watching the birds zip in to the feeders. My soul remembers this. Sixty-three times I have experienced early spring mornings. Some I haven’t paid a bit of attention to. Sad to waste even one, really. They are God’s gift to us. His promise of growth, of provision, of new life.
I used to love to do jigsaw puzzles. I had a table set up where I could spread out and enjoy solving it, piece by tiny piece. And each piece gave me more of the big picture. Life after the loss of your loved one is like a 1,000 piece puzzle with a ton of pieces missing. And sometimes they’re the critical ones…the ones that helped you identify what it is you’re shooting for.
Yesterday was glorious! Seventy-some degrees, intermittent clouds, gently breeze. I got my exercise by hiking up the hill to the back property line of the farm. There are seventy-four acres here to explore. It was gorgeous. I went to the old home place. The only thing left is the ruins of the old cellar house. I found a couple of old bottles and picked off some pieces of barn wood. It’s so fragile, you could almost crumble it in your hands. There were scraps of old leather boots and a chunk of glazed pottery from an old crock. The frogs were calling and the puddles were filled with tadpoles. As I came down the ridge below, I heard a racket back up at the strawberry barn and there were four or five huge buzzards coming in to roost for the night on the tin roof. On down the hill, I heard the call of the barred own I hear by the house occasionally. I made note of where the black raspberry patch is.
Last night I sat on the sofa for an hour, typing my post for today. It was long and quite eloquent…trust me. I did something I SWORE I would never do again. I typed for an hour without saving any of it and, what happened? The FB app crashed and I lost it all! You would think I would learn this valuable lesson because I can never duplicate a post once it’s gone. They are original, one-of-a-kind essays. So, I’m starting over.
Little texted me Wednesday night to let me know Pop passed away. She wanted me to know right away because she knew how important he was in my life. Little is deep. Big is deep too, but she’s more introspective. She holds a lot in. Not Little. She lets you know what’s what. We chatted back and forth for quite a while. I didn’t cry about losing Pop till Little told me he’s with Papa (Mr. Virgo) now and we’ll see them again when we die. Wow…she’s nine.
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