That thing

 

The thing about feeling so bad is that when I start to feel better -- it feels so good!

I started feeling bad last spring when a new doctor prescribed a bunch of new drugs. I eliminated them, one at a time, until I was only taking one and thinking I felt okay, mistakenly continued taking that one until it caused my body to develop gout as a by product of dehydration.

The gout was tenacious. It would not go away despite all the prednisolone packs they gave me and I eventually ended up at a podiatric surgeon's office. In desperation, she put a soft cast on my foot and eventually prescribed massive doses of naproxen, which I am not supposed to take for the sake of my kidneys. I took it and the gout gradually disappeared after weeks in the cast, but not before I fractured the bones in my left heel by favoring the sore right foot.

That was nearly seven weeks ago, so I was looking forward to this holiday week (both my birthday and Thanksgiving) as a time when I would be free to sleep without the boot I have been wearing. It would, or will be, the first time I have not had some sort of thing hindering my movement in nearly four months.

Then Tuesday I must have pulled a muscle in my back and for the last three days I have been in almost unbearable pain day and night. Taking naproxen and extra strength Tylenol both at maximum doses I have been at the point where I thought I would rather be dead. Finally last night things improved.

Today I have only taken the Extra strength Tylenol and used the heating pad. I still have to remain in a position that takes all strain off my back, semi-reclining, but it is the difference between night and day. Between unbearable and believing that I am really on the mend.

Just not feeling like nothing works makes me feel so good! Now I think that by Monday, when the doctor office opens, I will be okay and not even need to make an appointment, but I wouldn't have believed that Wednesday night, or all day Thursday.

Retirement

Retirement means no longer going to work everyday and getting paid by someone to do something so you can pay bills. I think it is the money that people mistake as a valid way of feeling valuable. If they were not paid, would they do the same thing with the same vigor?

I've never been able to sustain working at a job where I was miserable, or even unhappy. There is not enough money in the world to make me believe that this is the only option. Teaching preschool, working for a florist, these are simply things I loved doing that paid me money. The few short years I spent in a office couldn't pay me enough to stay, so I didn't. 

Fortunately I was able to retire fairly early in life. Retirement didn't mean much change for me. I've always done the things I loved. I loved taking care of my children, feeding them, teaching them, playing with them, introducing them to the world and hoping I was giving them what they needed to live in it.

I've always loved doing creative things. Sewing clothes for my children and myself, costumes for plays, crafts for gifts, is just one of the loves of my life. I used to love cooking and baking. I still love eating. Under the guise of parenting, I played with blocks, painted, drew pictures, rode bikes, did puzzles.

The pay I received for doing all the things I loved was getting to do it.

Retirement has only meant a little more time to do all those things I love in a way that is less stressful than it was when I had to get up early every day and go somewhere else.  I tell people I'm retired, but really I am just doing many of the same things I've always done.

I used to redecorate and rearrange my house. Now I live in an apartment, so today I spent the entire afternoon building a house with my blocks and then I furnished it and decorated it with exquisite miniatures. That is retirement!

Sensibilities

Everyone has their own set of sensibilities. Whether they are innate, or instilled is an interesting idea for me to contemplate.

I grew up with almost no personal boundaries in a family where the children were treated as simple innocent creatures to be cared for, en masse, with no allowances made for gender until I was almost twelve. I do remember my mother shouting at my father to put some clothes on when he was heading into the bathroom when I was around three, but it was her shouting that made it memorable. I don't even remember seeing at him.

My mother had no inhibitions when it came to her and me. Up until the time she died, I was comfortable anywhere she was and that included in the bathroom bathing or using the toilet. I don't remember any of my other siblings being there, so I don't know what they thought.

I had more privacy as a mother, but it was more because I like alone time and the bathroom was the only opportunity I had for that for ten years. I wasn't overly concerned about the state of being dressed or undressed as long as we didn't have company. Sometimes the bathroom was actually a surreptitious reading room!

I really have no sense of what is truly right or wrong when it comes to personal boundaries between people who are close, so I try to go along with whatever the person I am with feels comfortable with now. 

These are the ties that stretch

 

Loving someone does not necessarily guarantee that love will be returned, or returned in a way you might have chosen. But in the long run, it is the loving, more than being loved, that is so fulfilling.

Thinking of the loved one. Seeing the face of someone dearly loved, even just in pictures, can be a wonderful experience. After all, love means wanting the best for the beloved. Needing to have that love returned is less loving and more selfish. 

After a while, just hearing that a loved one is happy, or thriving makes me feel good. I find myself stretching my needs and imagination to fill in those long thin threads of separation and after much practice, I am good at it.

Long ago people left on boats or covered wagons and never returned home, but those at home never stopped loving them. Today we can fly across the world quickly, but being able to do something and actually doing it can be mitigated by many things. Still, the love, invisible as it may be, travels even more quickly and the heart is full.

Simple joys

Life has been a true trial this year. A bad reaction to a prescription set off a chain reaction that has seen me off one, or both feet since the beginning of August. Now that my daughter has moved to Arizona this has been difficult. I use a service to deliver groceries, but getting to my mailbox requires driving my car down there because I cannot walk down the little hill. Taking out my trash means making it to the parking lot, which is difficult, especially when both feet are bad.

One foot has been wrapped and in a boot since September. The other has me in too much pain to walk some days and okay others. I have a world class walker that is the only thing keeping me from being totally helpless this past Fall.

Other worries mount up. My car battery died. It jumped and started, but the radio needed to be reset. I had the factory code, only it didn't work. Trash piles up between doctor visits, which are the only time I've been able to leave the house. House cleaning is a spotty and iffy process done in bits and pieces depending on my feet, the walker and the job. Even changing the sheets is a major problem and I have had to sleep on top of the blankets because I have been sleeping with the boot on so that I can get up and make it to the bathroom twice a night.

Yesterday my foot doctor decided I still need to wear the boot, but the wrapping can come off. I just need two heavy socks now, which means that showering is now greatly simplified. I was able to drive through the Honda dealership and get my car radio working. I took out my trash, got my mail and even was able to get a flu shot and covid booster. 

I cannot tell you how relieved I feel being able to do these things. Simple things become major life problems when mobility is limited for so long. Cross your fingers that soon even the boot may come off (in the next two to four weeks.) Another upside? One of my twin kindergarten pen pals wrote back!

Lost in time and space

Family meant everything to me when I was growing up. My world was in a constant state of flux. We moved. People came and went. Schools changed, but my family was always there. 

I felt safe when I was with them. There was something solid and coherent in being together in the family car, or on vacation in Minnesota on the lake. Our homes, schools, and friends changed, but our routines were the same. The first twelve years of my life were spent as one fourth of a group called the kids. We bathed together, played together, rode bikes, and sat together at meals or watching television. There was such security in that little group.

My mother was the god-like creature who held us all together. Her strength, love, and fury defined our lives in no uncertain terms. I may have been afraid of her some times, but I always felt safe from everything else in the world when she was near by.

My father WAS god. He knew everything. The state superintendent of public instruction once described my dad as the most intelligent man he had ever met. I believed that. If he said something, I was willing to die before letting anyone else tell me it was wrong.

Moving to my mother's small home town when I was a senior in high school changed the dynamics. Not right away, but in the long run. There is a snobbery in small towns, a kind of backwards clannishness that separated our family. My younger siblings spent more time there than I did and the rift between us has never completely closed. We are no long one thing made up of four parts. We were them, and me, and each thing I did away from them - going to college, moving away, having an extended family of the heart, redefined who we were.

When my mother died we all drifted farther apart. Now my father and one of my brothers have passed on, my sister has migrated into a lifestyle I do not understand and my youngest brother is someone I talk to on the phone a few times a year. It is hard to imagine we were once one tight knit little solar system orbiting around the love and light of two people whose differences made them fit together like custom puzzle pieces.

I have sunshine on cloudy days

It has been a while since my last thot and it isn't because I haven't had thoughts. It is simply because I have had such a profusion of thoughts that I couldn't seem to formulate them into any one coherent Thot.

Heading into my next birthday I am a little bit surprised at how quickly my life has moved along. There are times that seemed, or seem interminable, but in general it has flown by faster than the recap that precedes Netflix series.

I have memories prior to age three that are as clear and vivid as ever. I can honestly say I remember fifty years ago as if it were yesterday. Even sixty years and maybe seventy!

It saddens me when I see someone treated as less than coherent and intelligent just because their skin is old and withered. It infuriates me when people are judged on their physical beauty. As a species many of us are still very very primitive. I sometimes wonder how many eons it will take for us to be truly civilized. 

Running fast to kill dinner might have been important to a caveman, but driving fast has nothing to do with saving ourselves as a species. Unless we figure in those throwbacks who still murder, rape, pillage and destroy.

Many of us haven't figured out that we are one with this planet and when she goes, we go. In fact, we will most likely go way before her, because we are not as resilient as she is. Thinking we have enough money to fling ourselves into outer space where we will survive on another planet is the height of hubris. Chances are if there is life out there and they know about us, they will not encourage our visiting. It would be like inviting un-housebroken wild things to live among them.

Still, on the whole, I am enjoying my life. I am proud of my children who seem to have their feet on the ground and their hearts in the right places. My family and family of the heart truly bring me sunshine on cloudy days. I love Iphones and computers.

And who could ask for much more than that?