The Experiment – A 365 Day Search For Happiness

Some days there isn’t a lot to say, but it is my job, with this experiment, to show up and say something. I am feeling very quiet just now, and words are not coming easily.

It has been a good day. Rachel and Jeremy came by to move all the big pots off the deck into the back yard garden area. Sadly, while the idea of a pot garden on my deck seemed like a good idea, things have not done well out there at all. Pitiful really. There is a gigantic old tree that overhangs the deck and I hadn’t really realized how little sun I got, things grew spindly and pitiful, what should have been been tall dinnerplate dahlias were so spindly they got very tall, bent over and broke, and didn’t produce flowers. The gladiolas have almost all died out completely. Many things died. I mean it was a heartbreaking mess. It is too late for these things this year but they will be out in a sunny area now and the greenery on top will feed the tubers until they all die out. There are a few small pots left on the deck but the idea of a deck garden wasn’t meant to be.

After Rachel and Jeremy left Maurice arrived to do all the yard work, cutting the grass and cleaning things up and making them tidy again. He wouldn’t usually work on a Sunday but he got rained out yesterday and hadn’t been for 3 weeks and he knew it was getting to be a jungle here. It is such a relief to have that done. It was really weighing on me. It is after 7 now, the dogs had their dinner and so did I. Now I look to the week ahead.

Tomorrow is a day I am not looking forward to. I have to go to the clinic and fill out all the paperwork again for the sliding scale for health care that I get through the clinic, and the Charity Care (I cringe at the name) that covers major medical things should that need arise. It is humiliating to be at this time of life with no medical insurance and very limited resources living on a small fixed income since the fire and this is not something I would write about here but I know that I am not alone in this and we learn to do, under very hard circumstances, what we need to do to survive. I am grateful for the clinic and have gotten good care there. Charity Care paid for my colonoscopy a year ago. I am learning, though it has been very hard, to be grateful and not ashamed. I never thought I would be in this position in my life but I am and I am doing my best with it all.

Part of me wants to delete that last paragraph. I do feel shame, and all of a sudden I am teary over having to write about that, but like having written about being almost 400 pounds at one point in my life just yesterday I keep coming back to the fact that if I write honestly I may be helping someone else. It is very difficult, heartbreaking, and scary to be growing older without the resources you had imagined you would have, not sure what will happen to you as you come into your later years. I just have to continue to be grateful for the help I have, which my daughter helped find for me after the fire. I am doing the best I can.

This is enough for now. I said more than I knew I had to say and more than I wanted to in some ways but recording all of this is part of my journey. And it has been a good weekend, a peaceful, quiet sort of weekend. I am grateful for that too. I hope you have had a good weekend too. May each day, as it comes, bring blessings, or at least a gentle peace. May we each find our way…