Category: coping

Lost and Found

Shirleyjdietz9 Comments
two bracelets, three earrings
two bracelets, three earrings

I suppose there are some people who never lose things.  I am not one of them.  In fact, there are certain things that I lose consistently, so much so that I plan for their loss.  That would be jewelry, and earrings in particular.  Losing things that you really like is heartbreaking, but at the same time it opens the way for some really good stories of recovery.

In my early 20’s I had one boyfriend (and only one) who had really good taste in gifts of all kinds – flowers, adventures, restaurants, and jewelry.  He bought me a pair of yellow gold earrings that were simple but beautifully designed.  I loved everything about them.  I must have lost them at least half a dozen times.  Once they were lost for over a year before I found them under the bed in the guest room at my parent’s house.  The first time I lost them was the most traumatic though.  I had only been married for a few months (but not to the guy with the good taste in jewelry) when the husband and I took a camping trip.  We were tenting for a week in Tennessee at a big reservoir near Oak Ridge.  The campground was super nice with big tent sites and a convenient bathhouse.  And then one day my earring was missing.

Why is it that no one ever tells you that you have only one earring on?  My ears are right out there in plain sight, but I am always the one who suddenly realizes that one is gone.  I ransacked our tent, shook out all the sleeping bags,  went through our suitcases, looked in every crack and crevice of our van. I backtracked to all the places I had walked.  Pretty much went around looking at the ground for at least half a day.  Then on the day we were leaving, I decided to have one last look in the bathhouse.  I found it in a pile of slime and hair over the drain of one of the showers.  Gross.  But did I care? No.  I was just in awe that I even thought of looking there.

One year for Christmas I told my daughters to tell the husband about a set of jewelry that I had admired in a store.  That’s how I have to do it with the husband – but that’s not a bad thing because I always end up with something I like that way. There was a necklace, a really pretty bracelet and earrings, and he got it all for me.  It wasn’t long before I lost the bracelet.  Everybody at work helped me look until we finally gave up.  I was so upset that I went back to the store and bought the bracelet again.  Somehow that helped, It was expensive but it helped.  Then I lost one of the earrings. Back to the store,  but you know they won’t sell you just one earring.  You have to buy a pair.  I decided having three was a good idea for someone like me.  I never knew when I might need a spare.  Months later I found the bracelet.  It had come off during a cooking demonstration when I was getting a pan out of the oven drawer of the range. I still have two bracelets and three earrings.  Good insurance.

I really like silver, but because it tarnishes all the time, I like white gold even better.  One vacation I splurged on a pair of white gold hoops. (Okay, I got them in Walmart, but they were real gold and they weren’t cheap.) These hoops have a clasp that drives me crazy – they come open with very little provocation.  I’ve lost them three times, one time for every year I’ve had them.  The first two times I found them in really crazy places involving strange medical equipment that is hard to describe, so I won’t.  But the last time I again gave up after several days of searching parking lots and offices I had visited.  I bought another pair which I did not like as well.  That was two months ago.

Last week, after my medical check up, I decided to re-take my blood pressure at home because I didn’t like how high it had been.  I have the old fashioned cuff and stethoscope, and there around the tubing of the stethoscope was my earring.  Who knew?  Good thing Walmart has a good return policy.

I told the story to my eldest daughter, who also loses things.  She said “I wish God loved me as much as he loves you…”  Oh yeah, it’s nice.  But I am quite sure he loves us both the same.

A to Z Challenge: M for Mindfullness

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What is going on in your mind? Do you wonder why you feel the way you do?

There is a lot of comfort and happiness to be found in knowing that we are loved and enjoyed by someone else.  When you see that someone enjoys you, it speaks of how they see you at the present moment, be it messy, inconvenient, embarrassing, negative or positive.  They enjoy YOU, not your ability to do.  It encourages you to think that they would love and enjoy you no matter what. And in turn, this makes you enjoy them and their association all the more.

However, some of us, myself included, are much more likely to be aware of our inability to measure up than we are of our ability to be enjoyed.  We want to be better than we know we are, and in dwelling on that we miss out on the fun fact that someone enjoys us and loves to love us. Today, I’m going to choose to be that person who knows they are loved and enjoyed, by the people and the God who know me very well and like me in spite of it. A thankful, mindful day…

 

They Left

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Crying lately, sometimes outwardly, mostly inwardly. I think it helps. Crying maybe leaves room for hope because I have never been able to cry forever.

Today my so ordinary life has been putting the furniture back in place. The air mattresses are deflated and rolled up. The sheets and towels are washed. The extra dishes are back in the cupboard. All my secrets have been exposed, like the rolls of cat hair under the sofa, the disorder of my physical, mental and emotional worlds.

I love to have family visiting in my home, so why didn’t I end up with a home that had room for visitors? Didn’t God know? That’s silly. He knew we needed a few things to be inconvenient/gross/dangerous in order to bond. In order to make memories. I hope they remember how much I love them. How good it was to know I could still put the kayaks in the water and paddle a ways. How good it was to know I could still survive a little sleep deprivation. How good it was to become more familiar with their ways, their sayings, their pastimes, their clothing, They were easy keepers and I loved every minute. Maybe they will come again if I don’t make them sleep outside in a tent, and if the dog next door doesn’t bark all night. But we would have figured all that out if they had stayed longer than three nights. We would have.

A small inward cry as I miss them.

Ode to WH

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This is to commemorate the death of WH (water heater) who died last night after 35 years of faithful service.  In this day and age lasting in a useful fashion for that long is truly remarkable.  The only other thing that approaches such a record these days is a package of hot dog buns which will last forever with no trace of mold.

WH was preceded in death by his brother WH2 who died late last year in the house next door. He had been suffering for several months from old age clicking, moaning and pinging and as some who knew  both he and his brother remarked,  “same equipment, same age, same water”.  His death was not a surprise, but the family had hoped for a few more years.

His absence was first noted during what was supposed to be a hot water load of laundry. Following that he was found in the foyer closet where his “water spirit” had been set free.  The papers, books and clothing that were with him when he died will never be the same. He was quite a water heater.

Fondly remembered for the many hot showers, clean dishes, and his warmth and faithfulness.  Rest in peace WH. You will be missed. CIMG2096

I Have Wondered Why It Happened…

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We were a fairly young family with two daughters, ages 8 and 5. This was our first big move, leaving friends, family and a comfortable home in the north for unknown circumstances in a state as far south as one could go. Almost everything was unfamiliar. All our belongings were packed into two trailers for the trip. My parents helped us move by towing one trailer and we pulled the other one behind our van.  I remember the end of that long trip – I was driving in the early morning on the interstate and hit an armadillo. It was our introduction to Florida.

After our first day of resting in a motel, our Realtor helped us to a temporary furnished apartment near the famous Siesta Beach with it’s wide, white sand beaches.  We found a storage facility and unloaded pretty nearly all our earthly possessions into two rented rooms to await the new house I was sure we would find within a short time.  We weren’t wealthy but we were blessed with enough. Our “things” were dear to us, having either been received as wedding gifts or handed down as heirlooms from both sides of our families.  We had only some clothing and personal items with us in the apartment.

A week and a few days later we went back to the storage facility to get something we needed.  I walked down the second story corridor to the rooms at the end and tried to figure out why the door on one of our rooms was standing open. I looked in the empty room and tried to tell myself there had been a mistake. Was I somehow in the wrong building? the wrong corridor? What could this mean? I was in a state of repressed panic. I tried to remember all the things we had put in that room but it was impossible – there was too much.  My grandmother’s china cupboard, our best (only) dishes and flatware, our few pieces of art, clothing, my precious knitting machine I had worked so hard to buy… where was it all?

As the next hour unfolded we learned the truth about what had happened that was stranger than anything I could have made up.  It took a while to figure out because, at first, the owners of the storage facility were clueless and defensive.  Gradually putting it all together, this is how it came about.  Previous to our arrival, the now empty storage room had been rented to a customer who was delinquent in paying.  The manager had put an overlock on the room and notified the person that they had X number of days to pay or the contents of their room would belong to the storage facility.  Sometime before that deadline, the customer managed to get in the facility, remove the overlock and get all their belongings out without the manager knowing about it.

I entered the story.  Having been sent up to inspect the building where I was told there were two empty rooms, I saw two rooms, adjacent to each other, empty with the doors standing open.  They looked the right size and we paid for them and filled them up.  I don’t remember even looking at the numbers on the doors.  There were actually three empty rooms off that corridor, one  that I didn’t know about. It’s door was closed and I didn’t even notice it. Unfortunately that was one of the two rooms the manager thought we had rented. The third room, now full of our things, was the one that had belonged to the deliquent customer. And now the deadline had come.

The customary action when the account for a storage room is delinquent is to offer the contents for auction, hoping to recover the delinquent payments (think Storage Wars on reality TV). Our belongings were bought, sight unseen, by a business that accumulated goods from estate sales and storage units and then held a weekly auction on a Friday night.  We learned this on the Saturday after our things had been auctioned.  We were allowed to go through their warehouse and look for anything we recognized that hadn’t been sold.   We bought back the wooden highchair that had been mine as a child.   We found our family picture albums in their trash. There was nothing else. We were devastated.  Although they knew names and addresses of those they had sold to, they would not release any of that information to us.

We felt it was a shared mistake, and attempted to collect damages from the storage company.  Because we had no receipts for the missing items and no appraisals of the furniture and antiques, we were told that legal precedent would be against us.  We would be better off to accept a small settlement rather than take the matter to court and get nothing.  Our lawyer felt so sorry for us he did not charge us for his services.  That was the only overt blessing that I’ve ever been able to recognize concerning this event.

Did life go on? Yes, of course.  But there are differences since then.  I wish I could say that I learned never to make a quick decision, always to check every transaction thoroughly – but that hasn’t always been the case.  What did change was that I hold loosely to “things”, in order that they might not get a grip on my heart.  I’ve bought very little furniture, invested very little in things that might fit into a packing box, spent more time in Goodwill, second hand shops and garage sales for the things I do need.  I’m not sure I understand why God allowed this to happen at a time when so many other difficult things were also taking place, but He did.  I think I will understand it better some time in the future.  And I’ve never given up hope that some day, in some backwoods antique shop, I might see Grandma’s china cupboard again.  I’m just sayin’ it would be kind of like God to do that…

I’m Already Challenged

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I was reading some of the blogs I’m following and ran across a writing challenge in one of them. There were so many different places to click for information and I kind of got lost reading from one to another.  I’m pretty sure I joined the challenge (although I have no clue that anyone knows I’ve joined, what I should do next if I have joined, or how to get back to where I can find any of this out). It doesn’t start until April and I’m planning to be smarter by then. The world is just too big.  It’s a good thing no one minds if I’m lost.

 

Proud to Be Silly

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I was debating whether to adopt the practice of having a certain type of post on the same day of every week, which seems to be common practice on many blogs, say like Silly Saturday. .  But I decided no.  This is my chance to not copy others.  So I’m going to be silly whenever I feel like I need to be, which would be tonight.

I name things. Sometimes I name things because it is easier to remember a name than it is to remember what the thing is.  For instance, Ted.  Ted is a piece of furniture I’ve had for over 20 years. I’ve never been able to figure out what exactly Ted is but it sits in my dining room and holds dishes and tablecloths, batteries and flashlights.  Not a china cabinet, not really a buffet, it became easier to just call it Ted.  Especially when trying to tell someone like the husband where to find something in it.  “Look in the drawer of the…. of the….. that thing in the dining room!”  So much easier to say “Look in the top drawer of Ted.”  And now, after nearly a quarter century he’s finally figured out who Ted is.

I also like to name my vehicles.  They are with me for so long that they become disturbingly like family members – they may as well have names.  My last vehicle, the Aztek, was named Sunny which was short for sunshine, being that it was bright, schoolbus yellow.  I’ve had my new old car for almost three weeks now and have been unsure what to name it.  I wanted something meaningful.  Today I decided to call it LC (Elsie).  LC stands for little car which is my first thought almost every time I interact with the thing. “My goodness, this is a little car!” I think, as I try to figure out where to put my coffee cup, my cereal bowl, my purse, my workbasket, my sunglasses, and my lunch. “My goodness this is a little car!” I think as the husband bangs his head climbing into the passenger seat.  “This is a little car!” I say to myself as the pump only puts in 9 gallons on a fill-up and goes twice as far on that as the previous vehicle.

I have a daughter with the “naming gene” too.  Her present truck is named Nemesis.  We bought it for her rather hastily, without her input and she pretty much can’t stand the thing. The car she had before Nemesis was named Claire.  I know she named her very first car too but I can’t remember it’s name, Patty or something like that. I didn’t really bond with that car.

I’ve named my houseplants (because I can never remember the word “hydrangea”), several notebooks, my kindle, and my property (the oneacrewoods). I have a cat I call Gray Kitty, which is a very practical name for a gray cat.  So you see, naming things is kind of an adaptive mechanism as well as being a bit odd, and it serves me well.  I’m just sayin’, I’m kind of proud of being silly when it comes to names.

Have you ever named an inanimate object? C’mon, fess up.

Again, I Wonder

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Life is wonder full, full of things to wonder about that is, and today I am wondering about the judicial system.  I have just spent three days serving on a jury, which for the most part was an interesting and pleasant time. I’ve never before had the experience of coming into a room where everyone stood until I sat down (felt very unusual) and I got to eat a restaurant lunch downtown three days in a row (also felt unusual).

This trial ended after two and a half days of laborious testimony with the judge coming down today, after our lunch break, and dismissing us.  Evidently both parties had decided to back up to a previous point where the judge alone could make a decision and he did just that and settled the matter.  It was not the decision I would have made, but of course I do not know much about the intricacies of legal proceedings.  I cannot figure out why both parties agreed to settle the matter this way and there is a lingering sense of injustice that I just can’t shake.

This is the fourth time I have been closely connected to a matter settled in a courtroom or through legal representation. I’ve felt this sense of injustice every time even though I am grateful for our judicial system – grateful we aren’t out settling our differences at gunpoint in an alley somewhere.  These experiences leave me with a disturbing distrust. Ever felt that? Have we created a system that has become so complicated that a clever (or powerful, or influential, or rich) person can find a way to do things that shouldn’t be done and make them seem absolutely legal?

I’m thinking maybe, yes.

I don’t know.

Troubling.

I think I will actively try to avoid depending upon a lawyer, suing anyone, or being in a courtroom for any reason, anytime in the future.  I’m just saying that a lingering sense of injustice can really lower a person’s expectations. Hopefully I won’t get sued for saying all this….

Does anyone have a different story that can cheer me up? I would love to hear it.

Comfort Zones

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I’ve been out of mine so long today that I’m forgetting what it is like to be in my comfort zone.  Loud, loud music that is not culturally familiar, much heat and little water, crowds of  people, very few of whom I can communicate with, and those I can understand I still can’t communicate with because of deafness  due to loud, loud music.  It seems that our mission team is very well organized but  somehow we English speakers are not understanding enough to prepare ourselves for each step as it comes,  (Or  could it be that God knows we would be resistant/scared/freaked out if we understood ahead of time. Yeah, that’s it.) 

We are always being asked for the unexpected.  What is the matter with us that we don’t expect to be asked to talk, lead, teach, play games, and do  physical exams on sick villagers? The excitement is building as I contemplate having to see  patients and dispense remedies, depending on an interpreter   to know what  problems I’m supposed to address… in the heat, in the dirt, under a tent, amidst confusion.  We are called on to be flexible and all we can do is proceed.  This may turn out well, it may turn out not so well, but either way it will only last about three hours tomorrow.  I’m just sayin’ I’m thankful for that and I think I can do it.

Now It’s Getting Personal…

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I was out of town over Thanksgiving and the first week of December.  My car sat in the garage, shielded from the sun, resting, but evidently not enjoying itself.  I think it misses frequent contact with the road and other cars and of course, when you meditate on what you’re missing you develop an attitude (big time).

A car with an attitude, who knew? This is not a new discovery. My car and its shenanigans have been written about before because it is a thoroughly frustrating problem for me.  It has cost me money and put me in inconvenient circumstances. Usually I’ve been able to work around and tolerate what goes on. I have a high powered battery charger with me always, and my keys are arranged so I can take the fob with me when the key is stuck in the ignition. But now, well, it’s getting personal – a whole new level.

One of my first trips out was to a meeting in Sarasota. I parked and said a little prayer as I turned the key, only to find it stuck in accessory position. Knowing I would have to leave it like that, I turned off all the things that could drain the battery, including the radio.  I got out, shut the door, hit the lock button on the fob, and the radio came on.  It would be kind of fun to have a car that behaved like a naughty child if I didn’t have to depend on it so much.

After a day or two of being docile and compliant, it again surprised me at 6:30 one morning as I woke it up to take me to work.  Lights flashed, things whirred under the hood, lots of clicking, but no starting.  After several tries the flashing and clicking got weaker so I gave up. The husband took me to work. 

The car sat in the garage with the battery charger attached for a day or two with no improvement while I got permission from our mechanic to get it over to his shop. The husband got a tow truck the next morning. Just to make sure we were still dealing with a malfunction, I turned the key and satisfied myself that we were still clicking and flashing with seemingly quite a bit of battery power.  The husband was able to put it in neutral for it to be winched up onto the truck. Off it went.

The husband went ahead to show the tow driver where to take the car and this is the report he came back to me with.  They arrived at the garage and could not get the car out of park to roll it off the truck. There was no response from the battery at all. So they had to use the “shake and jolt” method to slide the car down the ramp.  Jerk, slam, slide, bang, repeat…   After getting to the ground, the husband decided to get in and turn the key and, you guessed it, it started.  He started it half a dozen times with no trouble at all.  Then he paid the tow truck driver $50 and they left. Sob…

I have stopped in at the garage since and talked with the mechanic. Mostly what he said was “you’re in no hurry, are you?” No, I guess not. I noticed he had a charger hooked up to my car.  I can’t imagine why.  I’m just sayin’, I see a trade in my future. Don’t tell the car.