Morning Walk

Baxter led me on another forty-five minute walk this morning right around 7 am. He decided we would walk first around the small block across the street and then the big block that we live on. We trudged through moist weeds in pursuit of something he could smell but not find – a daily occurrence actually.

Already the sun was starting to heat up enough that I was warm walking around in a tshirt and jeans. The breeze that we have now, had not yet graced us with its presence then so the air felt heavy with moisture.

Though it is going to be in the 80’s today, I’m hoping it will stay cool till I go to work – then I won’t have to shut the windows and turn on the air. I leave a fan on for Baxter so he can be refreshed if he gets too warm.

Mondays are always shitty days at work – people who relaxed on the weekends are back in the rat race today with short tempers. I’ll be glad when I have Mondays off again.

Fixed up my turkey and got it in the oven cooking. Of course, I read the instructions on how to prepare it after I had it in the oven so realized, too late, that I didn’t do it all exactly right. {sigh} Too late to worry about it now.

I am out of soda which was intentional because I was going to quit but now I am craving it so badly that I think I’ll run to the store for some and quit tomorrow.

Reasons Behind the Rush

My sister asked me the other day what the rush was to move back to Iowa – Iowa isn’t going anywhere, she rightly pointed out.

To me it is quite simple actually. I am on two kinds of medicine for chronic depression. Being here in Florida, I thought, would make my problems with depression magically vanish. Who could be, I reasoned, depressed in Paradise??

What I didn’t count on was my depression getting worse as each year passes. I love Florida – I do – but there is an ache in me that Florida can’t fill. You know, they always say “absence makes the heart grow fonder” and “you don’t know what you have until you miss it”. That ache is missing my son and family so intently that it hurts. I feel as if I’m in exile and am soon to be released back into the world. When holidays, birthdays, and the like come along, I find myself sinking deeper into depression then I have ever been and it takes weeks to get over it.

I moved to Florida to find myself and to give my son space to find himself. Both objectives have been achieved – I know what is important to me and what my dreams are and he has grown to be the man I hoped he would. Now that the reason for coming doesn’t exist anymore, I don’t want to spend one more second this far from him. I am down here wasting time on things no longer important to me.

Time is precious – we never know how much we or are loved ones have – so spending it around your loved ones is the most important thing a person can do. I don’t want to spend another day, nor hour, in a place I’m ready to let go of. I do not want to squander my time here on Earth.

So yes, I’m in a hurry to move. I want to move forward with my life and bring with me the wisdom I have gleaned from living here in Paradise.

I like this quote by Henry David Thoreau “Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows” – that channel is my son and the things that mean the most to me.

Still Summer

I finished the book “Still Summer” by Jacquelyn Mitchard last night when I got home. Though the story, to me, gets off to a slow start, it does begin to pick up steam by the time it reaches the middle.

It is a poignant story of a group of high school friends who charter a sailboat to cross the Caribbean on vacation. These women are in their mid-forties except for one woman’s nineteen year old daughter who joins the group at the last minute.

My only disappointment with the story is that these strong, capable women started falling apart so quickly once tragedy struck. There were some very basic things they should and could have done to make the ending happier but they failed to do them. I think just about everyone would have done the common sense things yet these educated, adventurous women didn’t figure it out until it was almost to late.

The story was emotional – I could really picture that being myself and my sisters on that boat – struggling to keep it together and to use each other’s strengths. Each person in the group has to take stock of what is important to them – they also have to find out what they are really made of inside.

I would recommend this book and think many people I know would enjoy it’s tale of tragedy on the high seas. It was very good.