There is Hope Yet in Everyday Ramblings

I was pretty sure that the holiday decorations for the castle house would be extraordinary, the original folly house up behind where I live, serious up back there, and it wasn’t until I looked carefully at this picture of the wreath on the front door I took last week that I realized I was right. :) Snowmen! It is a snowman wreath. That is so whimsical and apropos.

Of course we are not having snow now. We are having soaking endless rain. There is an avalanche warning on the mountain for gosh sakes. They are having a lot of snow up there!

Yesterday afternoon, I was so grateful to be home, we had a huge intense squall downpour with thunder and I was looking through all my pictures for one of the little cottage going up for auction in a month near here I wrote about in my last post to put up on Facebook per Rose Sunrise’s request.

I discovered a couple of things looking at thousands of pictures from the last eight years or so… One, I haven’t taken nearly as many house portraits in the neighborhood as I thought I had, and two…I have encountered a lot of loss in the last six years.

But boy do I have garden pictures!

It is almost a year now since my sister died and looking at pictures I took at the end of January last year when Kes and me went up to help do the paperwork and pack up her things and those pictures are heart wrenching to look at now to realize all of that is gone.

The household that was the core outward focus of our lives because it contained three generations of family and many artifacts from said family is gone.

The decorative plate my father brought back for my mother from some mysterious trip to Mexico that has hung on so many walls over the years is now carefully featured on a wall in Kes’s beautifully remodeled kitchen is a symbol that holds both opposites, change and tradition.

I know we have all experienced this on some level. It is a natural side effect of being human and living longer and with much more ease than previous generations. There are days though when the loss feels heavy and the future very uncertain, as we don’t know the kinds of connections that will grace our time ahead.

And in my view, connection with others is our greatest joy.

Searching for it (and expressing it back) is the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning, which is an interesting thing for someone as introverted and sometimes misanthropic as I can be. (My father was a misanthrope so I come by it honestly…)

My whole life has been about finding some sort of balance between the connection I so deeply long for and the thing that drives me back to my nest so intensely when I get too much, and not of the right kind out there in the big rough and tumble world.

This year I am not going to try so darn hard. What I am going to do is see if I can open to what is there exactly as it is. If I am lucky I will have the opportunity to develop other deep connections with kindred souls as I live as balanced a life as I can manage.

In the morning yesterday I was at the gym using the upper body weight machines (I haven’t done that in ages!) and I was looking at my form (and all the forms of the guys using the machines around me) and except for my thighs I was thinking wow, I look better to myself than I have maybe ever looked to myself and I tell you that is an accomplishment that is pretty darn extraordinary. At 61!

There is hope yet.