Archive | June 2026

Countdown

Jun17

My daughter Tammie cheerfully announced, “Our cruise ship will be leaving the dock in seven days, eight hours and thirteen minutes.” Looking down at the cruise ship’s navigator app in her phone, she questioned, “Have you looked at the dining room menu? What would you order if you were on the ship today?”

I complained, “The closer we get to leaving for the cruise, the more anxious I feel. I feel like a child waiting for Christmas Eve and Santa’s visit.”

“That’s wonderful, isn’t it?” exclaimed my daughter, like a true high school cheerleader.

Frowning, I slowly shook my head no and explained, “When you and your sister were little, the last few days before Christmas was painful. Your anticipation and hopes made you emotional, anxious little people, which made me feel sad. The holiday was supposed to be fun. Instead, you wished away all the days and the fun things we could do leading up to Christmas. You just wanted that one day to arrive.”

Holding up her phone for me see the screen, Tammie asked, “Doesn’t looking at the navigator app make you think about the fun things we will get to do, to see, to experience?”

I insisted, “The app does make me think about all those things, but since I can’t do them until we get to the ship, I feel like I am spinning my wheels and getting nowhere. I feel like I am wishing my life away.”

The phrase, ‘wishing my life away’ made me think of my mother. When I was in third grade one evening before Christmas, I lamented to my mother how I didn’t like waiting for Christmas Eve and wished it would hurry up and come. My fifty-five-year-old mother’s sage advice was, “Don’t wish your life away.”

Continue reading →

To Bend Again

Jun10

The minute I turned into the parking lot I saw them: tall, shelved carts filled with colorfully blossoming plants. The store’s garden center appeared to have more plants than room, so the workers had lined the sidewalk beside the store with the overflow.
Usually, going to a garden center fills me with excitement and anticipation. Today, remembering that I was only two and a half months post hip replacement, I felt ambivalent. I wanted to buy plants, put in a garden, and take care of flowerbeds, but I didn’t know if I could physically bend over far enough to do the necessary work. Immediately after the surgery, bending at the waist more than 90 degrees was prohibited.


I’ve been feeling afraid to bend down to weed my flowerbeds for fear of hurting myself and find that I quickly tire after a very short spell of work, but I keep trying. Slowly, I’m hoping to build my stamina back up.


As I walked though the aisles of plants, picking out a modest amount of baby plants that needed to be tucked into a moist, earthen bed, my excitement mounted to the point where I ended up buying more plants than I had originally planned to buy. When I reported my purchases to my daughter I explained, “Do you remember the comedian who liked to claim, ‘The devil made me do it!?’ Well, the devil had nothing to do with my plant purchases. What happened was that an able-bodied gardener temporally took possession of my body and made me do it.”


Speaking of the devil, besides worrying about my post-surgical ability to bend enough to garden, I also worried about the overwhelming number of blood-sucking insects in my yard.

Continue reading →

Hung-Up on Hangers

Jun3

Stepping back, I scanned the closet with satisfaction. I’d drastically reduced the contents which had been hidden for so many years behind its two 1970-style folding doors. There were two piles of closet contents on the bedroom floor behind me. One pile would be gathered up and placed in the garbage. The other pile would go to Saint Vincent de Paul as a donation. All that I had left in the closet was sorted and neatly stored in boxes.

When they were little, my two daughters shared the bedroom with this closet. I smiled, remembering one summer in their childhood. I would tuck them into bed each night and they never failed to request that I shut the closet doors. When I asked them why having the closet doors ajar bothered them, they explained that a giant frog holding a huge trident was in that closet at night. They didn’t sound scared but were insistent that the doors be closed.

Before shutting the doors on the newly cleaned closet, I gave it one last satisfied glance. Something I hadn’t noticed before suddenly came into focus: high in the closet, all shoved to one end, hanging on a mounted water pipe was a huge collection of wire clothes hangers. I’d stopped hanging clothing in this closet years ago but kept the wire hangers.

There were two different types of hangers. One third of them had spring-loaded clips on each end, which was ideal for hanging skirts or pants. They were good, sturdy old-fashioned hangers made to last. The rest of the clothes hangers were all made of heavy gauge wire. No matter how heavy a coat is, the weight wouldn’t make the wire bend.  I couldn’t bear to throw any of them out. You can’t buy new ones of this quality anymore!

Later that day, I started to think about my obsessive determination to keep the old-fashioned clothes hangers. On a recent visit to a store, I’d seen sturdy plastic clothes hangers in various colors. It made me wonder if people color-code their wardrobes or match the hanger colors to their bedroom walls. Clothes hangers certainly aren’t hard to replace.

Continue reading →