An Invincible Summer - A Woman's Journey

Big girl panties on.  Crown adjusted at a jaunty little angle. Won’t worry about a future that may never come. Won’t let tomorrow steal from today.  Thank you, ever so much, for your kind words of encouragement. 

 I’ve cleaned up the mess left by her “non-accountant” hubby who was fired from his last job for stealing and who did her books for two years while embezzled over $100K (oddly enough, he was the one who trained me). I brought everything up to date and reconciled all un-reconciled accounts. Now the writing is on the wall. I’ll be lucky to get 10 hours of work from this company. My budget was already tight but this is untenable.   I know I need to look for another job but I am disheartened and down. The last round of looking took forever and left me feeling about two inches tall. Two of the jobs I was offered are still looking for someone to fill their position. That tells me what I suspected in the first place. Over work or bad atmosphere, but when the pay looks too good, it almost always is.  I’ll be 59 in a few weeks. My hearing continues to degrade. The wrinkles are far deeper now than they were before this journey began just 1 1/2 years ago. Each passing week I become ...

There's a plastic box in the garage where I store them all. We both have a number of pairs, used for different reasons. Heavy duty, light weight, thorn resistant, in small and large. I pull my favorite work gloves out of the box. I slip the left one on, snug but not too, and dip my right hand into the other. But wait!! My hand encounters something soft, very soft and I quickly pull it back out to take a look.  Low and behold, a half dollar size spider web containing about 3 dozen tiny baby spiders scampering around.  I do the dance. You know? The dance! Admit it......you've done the dance once or twice yourself. I throw the dirty bastards down to the ground and dance a little more.  Boy Scout picks up the glove, maneuvers to the trash can to forcefully empty out the contents. He comes back to me with a smile, the man taking care of his woman. The smile falters as I turn to walk away. Pulling on a different but well inspected glove, I mumble, "Those are dead to me". I ...

I have had two episodes of deep intuition in my lifetime. Ones the stand out in my memory. I am sure there were others that came naturally and were so subtle that they were not witnessed by my conscious brain. I have mentioned both at one time or another but they were on my heart as I try rely more and more on the knowledge my body has buried deep inside. Both episodes came when I was a young mom. The first came around 1996/97. I was sitting with child number 3 and an inner voice said to me, “This child may be gay and, if he is, what are you going to do? Who will you be?” Now, before you judge, it was a long time ago and my world was very small but my soul challenged me to be someone different. The answer was easy….this is a person I love and value. Many years went by and I watched that child grow up as a man who had a couple a girlfriends and never spoke of his sexuality. Then one day I got a call and that man let me know that all that time he was a she, in the wrong body. My body/sou...

I had lunch with a friend. She’s a rockstar. Her life is very disciplined with self care, exercise, recovery and deliberate but limited socializing. She meditates, reads like it is nourishment, and rides her bike thousands of miles each month. I asked her why, since she is financially set and fully retired at 52, she doesn’t move to a place like San Diego or Santa Barbara where she could ride her bike year round. She had a few reasons but one of them struck me. First she mentioned that the lack of seasons would bore her, she loves the change. Then she spoke of familiarity and fearlessness. She knows every road, every bike trail, every neighborhood. She knows where to go and, more importantly, where not to go. As I sit here in my car doing my morning writing, meditation and study, I see a trailhead not 30 feet from my door. It calls to me but not loud enough to overcome the lack of knowing the area. I don’t know if I should feel safe or not and it makes me ache for what I know. It also ...

We pass by the house frequently since it sits on a busy thoroughfare. We know to look every time we pass and guess what will we see. Will it be the two Dalmatians, sitting on the couch that backs up to the giant panel window, waiting for their human to come home? Or will it be their human, sitting slightly to the right of middle (allowing for a better view of the giant mounted tv across the room) of the said couch. They are never there at the same time. It’s one or the other. One sleepless night, when my body was willing but my brain was not, I did a little sleuthing. It’s amazing what you can find out about a complete stranger.   His name is Gary and, from what I can tell, he’s never been married. He has worked his way up in a air duct company. He’s now the senior VP but it’s a small company and he still goes out on jobs, judging from  the reviews on Yelp. I know he has two siblings and that their father passed away in 2018. His memorial was held in a Buddhist temple and Gary...

Boy Scout: Was that what I think it was. Me: pretty sure it was. Boy Scout: You think so?  Me: I do. Boy Scout: A hooker with a walker? Me: Yes, a hooker with a walker in a “Hit Me Baby One More Time” schoolgirl outfit, plaid mini and all.  Uncomfortable laughter in the car for just a minute while we took it in. The human tragedy of Portland is so in your face and heartbreaking but every once in awhile I see something I haven’t seen before and my system has to process it. I don’t have any idea how old she was. She looked to be Filipino, no taller than 5’1”, and possibly 55 to 60 years old. Truthfully she could have been 40, lord knows the street takes its toll.   I wish her well. I wish her food, comfort from this heat and a safe place to sleep.  Life ain’t easy but it is much harder on some than others.