Dear Neighbor. . .

 

(source)

 

ESTATE LANE, N.S.
-12*C feels like -18*C
11*F feels like 0.4*F

Snow to begin in about 4 hours

Dear Neighbor,

I am writing to you on a very cold January morning. The sun is not yet up. I was awake very early this morning. I had been dreaming that I was visiting the daughter of an old friend whom I had known for many, many years just prior to waking up. Oddly enough she was living in the exact house she used to live in when her mother and I were friends so many years ago.  We lived next door to each other in a row of town houses in a community near where I live now. Those townhouses no longer exist. The whole community was torn down several years back and you would never know it had existed, except for the school which is still there.  The earth has swallowed all other traces of it up.

Anyways I was dreaming that I was visiting this girl, and her family.  When I went to leave to come home, my shoes had disappeared. We looked everywhere for them to no avail and when I went out to get into my car to leave, in my sock feet, my car had been stolen. It was just simply gone, no longer there. I awoke feeling quite upset and bereft. 

I know it was just a dream. It was not real.  But often what you have dreamt during the night clings to your skin like a shadow along the length of your waking day. It can take a while, sometimes the whole day, to shake off those feelings, be they sweet or be they foreboding.  I hope this one slips off the radar of my being soon  . . . I don't know why I should dream such a thing, except that it is about loss, and I have suffered many over the last few years.

(source)

Cindy and I went out to supper with Dad last night. Dan did not feel like going out, so it was just us. We went to the place just around the corner from me, so a different place this time. We all reverted to our old picks. Cindy and dad each had the haddie bits and chips and I had the one-piece fish and chips. It was good as always. Nobody chose to have dessert.

When the waitress set our plates down one of Cindy's haddie bits rolled off the plate onto the table, so the girl got her a fresh one to replace it. These types of things happen frequently to Cindy when we are eating out.  Once at a Chinese restaurant, the spring roll she had ordered was actually on the wrong plate and when the girl went to move it, it fell off the plate and onto the table (which was not very clean I have to say.) That time a big fuss was made over it being replaced and we swear to this day that they just refried the same spring roll and brought it back. Another time I was swishing a fly away from my own dinner and it landed on top of hers upside down, doing the backstroke in her gravy.

I said to her last night it is like she is a magnet for eating out disasters. lol  Not really, but they do seem to happen to her and not the rest of us! You can't make this stuff up!

 

(source)

Several people came in while we were there that dad knew.  Of course they stopped to pass the time of day with him.  He delighted in telling each one of them that he's still here and he just turned 91. He seemed to be very pleased about that and I reckon it is something for him to be pleased about. He really has outlived all of his friends and most of his family, only his two very youngest siblings are still here, and he has outlived our mother by six years.

Believe it or not they just renewed his driving license for another five years.  He does not drive much these days, but he does drive some. Cindy does most of his driving for him. His mobility is very poor. He cannot walk very far or stand for very long and is very unsteady on his feet. He does have a cane to use, but it is really more of a hindrance as he tends to carry it, rather than use it to give himself stability.

We are all getting old now and it is our hope and prayer that at least one of us will outlive him so that he has someone to care for him. I will be 70 on my next birthday and my sister 67. My brother 65, and he has cancer.  (I pray each day that he will be okay.)  Dad is like a Timex watch. It takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'. Except for his mobility issues and hearing, he is in pretty good shape and of good humor.

We are grateful for that tender mercy.

(source)

It was positively frigid when I went out to check my post box yesterday. I wouldn't have gone out but for the fact that I had gotten an email to say something had been delivered to it. I had forgotten how very cold January could be on the Northern side of the Gulf Stream. In the U.K. we were on the Southern side of it and we only ever very rarely suffered extreme temperatures, neither Winter nor Summer. I found it quite pleasant most of the year. 

I cannot imagine what it must be like to live in the Artic Circle. I suppose you become acclimatized to the cold eventually, but I cannot imagine. Not really. Nor do I want to. 

I am quite content as I am.  I am a person who loves the changing of the seasons. I do not think I would be very happy where each day stretched into the next all year round with little to no change.  Where the weather was always sunny and hot. I do enjoy the way the seasons are marked here in the Northern Hemisphere, and the many different blessings each one brings to us. Although there are marked similarities. Winter is always winter is always winter, etc.  There is a variance to that algorithm with some Winter's being harsher than others, some Springs wetter, some Summer's hotter and more humid, and autumn . . . blissful autumn, it is always, more often than not, just perfect. 

Yes, I AM a girl who loves Octobers.

(source)

I was thinking about my paternal Grandmother the other day.  She had 12 children who lived, not counting the three or four that she miscarried. I think that she, despite being a woman who was never well, was always pregnant. One of the joys of being a French Catholic at that time. My father was the third oldest child.  His older brother Maurice passed away when he was 16 from some kind of heart ailment, and he had a younger brother Andre who passed when he was 2 years old and a sister, Jocelyne at the tender age of 1 year old. I have vague memories of my grandmother as being a tiny, dark haired and feisty woman.  She outlived her husband by 20 years. How very difficult her life must have been.  They were always poor anyways, but she would have had to bring up the last 3 or 4 children on her own.

When my father was just a few years old, she had suffered with tuberculosis and was put into a Sanitarium to get better.  My grandfather put my father and his older sister and brother into a Catholic orphanage for the duration as he could not care for them. My father did not thrive and so an old aunt (Hilda) took him out of the orphanage and home with her. I remember my mother saying that my father could remember looking through a wire fence at his older brother and sister in the yard of the orphanage with a crust of bread in his hand, missing them very much.

Anyways, I was thinking about my Grandmama and all that she had gone though in her life, and how difficult it must have been for her to lose three children like that, plus the miscarriages, etc. She was also in a very bad car accident in later years along with her sister. Her sister died in the accident and my grandmother was in rehab for quite some time. I remember her having a scar from the accident across her forehead.

She was a great craftswoman and an invisible mender. People would bring garments to her to be mended, and you would have never been able to tell that there had ever been anything wrong with them when she was done. No moth holes, tears, etc.  It is entirely possible we get our craftiness and artistic talents from her. 

 

(source)

We, my sister and I, come from a line of strong women on both sides of our family. None of them had easy lives, or . . . perhaps that is just the way of women? Perhaps we all have varying degrees of suffering in our lives. Many suffer in silence.

What doesn't kill us makes us stronger . . . perhaps that inner strength that we carry with us is our super-power.  

I have seen it written that it's not so much the things that happen to you in life which matter most as it is the way we react to those things. I believe there is a great truth in that statement.

Our lives are lived out in days, hours and minutes.  We are being shaped daily into new creatures and the place of that formation is in the small moments of today.

It was Alfred Hitchcock who said that movies were "life with the dull bits cut out." Car chases, first kisses, interesting plot lines and good conversations.  When you think about it, it's very true. If we cut out the mundane, what is left is pretty exciting.

But the mundane, the boring . . . those moments matter too. Days that pass in ways that feel small and insignificant are weighty and are a part and parcel of the good and abundant life.

Every minute matters and counts. We all matter and count.

 

(source)

I want you to do a little exercise with me.  Right now, I want you to stop whatever it is you are doing and to look around and list 10 things that you are grateful for. I'll go first.

1. The roof over my head.

2. My heat pump which is keeping me warm.

3. My drink which is keeping my thirst at bay.

4. Two furry napping companions that keep me company 24/7

5. The purpose and meaning that I find in writing these missives.

6. Quiet and solitude, room for thought.

7. My health, such as it is.

8. My family and friends.

9. My faith and the strength that it brings into my life.

10.Having enough, and then some . . .  of everything.

I could really keep going. The list doesn't look like much, and it may not have much value to anyone else, but it is pretty powerful and valuable to me. It means I am present. In the here and the now. And it means I am grateful, and my life is a life filled with simple things which bring me great joy. A life lived with gratitude is a life filled with peace.

I am not entirely sure how I will spend my day today, but it will be spent in one way or another. It will not come again. All the small mundane moments will count and add up.  I will find joy and abundance in even them. Each moment will pass, that is a certainty of which I have no control, what I do with them, how I make them count . . . that is entirely up to me.

A thought to carry with you . . . 

° * 。 • ˚ ˚ ˛ ˚ ˛ •

•。★★ 。* 。
° 。 ° ˛˚˛ * _Π_____*。*˚
˚ ˛ •˛•˚ */______/~＼。˚ ˚ ˛
˚ ˛ •˛• ˚ ｜ 田田 ｜門 ★

 *.˛.°Kindness. Easy to do. Easy not to do.

Choose the latter, no one will notice.

Choose the former and lives may change.

~Julian Bowers Brown° * 。 • ˚ ˚ ˛ ˚ ˛ •

° * 。 • ˚ ˚ ˛ ˚ ˛ •° * 。 • ˚ ˚ ˛ ˚ ˛ •

New in The English Kitchen today, Breakfast Omelet Tortilla.  Surprisingly easy to make and quite delicious.  I  know I say that all the time, but it's true!

I hope you have a wonderful day.  Be happy. Be present. Be blessed. Don't forget!

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And I do too!