Heavenly

Amanda, my helper, just left.  She is a darling.  Always smiling, asking me what she can do, doing what I ask….I can’t believe I’ve been managing this long without someone like her.  I feel very, very fortunate to have qualified AND to get someone so perfect.  She has to be gone for a week at the end of the month for some kind of training, but someone else will come (hopefully).  She took me to the store today, vacuumed again, swept the bare floors, and emptied the dishwasher.  And then we sat and talked for a bit before she had to leave.  It was heaven.

I am going to keep pushing myself the best I can; I had thought of sending her to the store without me.  She knows what I like and where everything is in Fred Meyer now.  And we went to the PCC on Wednesday when she took me to my therapist.  But I decided I need to do as much as I can for as long as I can.  Having her next to me for physical support is great but I need to move if possible.  I have enough gastro intestinal problems and moving helps, though for me, not much anymore.  I’m broken inside in so many places it’s too much to count.  Trying to “eat right” to get it going is like giving a carrot to a blind person, hoping it will help him/her see.  My bladder and bowels are neurogenic; they just don’t work.  I wonder how many posts are about this?  Yikes.  Enough, eh?

Well, tomorrow is my birthday.  The last of this decade.  I never thought I’d live this long.  When I look around me and start thinking about all that I’ve missed, I start going into panic mode it’s so overwhelming.  So I can’t.  Think about it, that is.  I have a good friend coming over tomorrow, and another one Sunday.  My nephew told me he’d come by with his girlfriend, who is in town, but we’ll see.  He’s a doll, but I’m sure they have many plans.  I think about how much time I spent with my aunts when I was his age; I loved them so much.  Ruth and Esther.  They were the sisters of my grandmother, Ida.

Ruth was so funny, and Esther a little less.  They lived together after their husbands died.  I remember so many funny stories they told, things they said.  Once, Ruth was opening a package that had come in the mail for her.  It was her birthday, and it was summer.  Summers in Minnesota are the antithesis of winter.  Hot as heck and humid to boot.  Anyway, she opened it up and it had been a box of chocolates, but it was one melted mess of chocolate.  She threw it across the room and declared “What kind of idiot sends chocolate through the mail in the summer!”  She said it not in anger or disgust, but a kind of perplexed sarcasm.  I laughed my head off.  And it wasn’t edible, which was a shame, though now-a-days that kind of chocolate is too sweet and the fillings way, way too sweet.  For me, anyway.

She and Esther argued, told funny stories and entertained me even when Ruth fell and broke her hip.  She must have been in agony, but when I went to see her in the hospital she was telling off color jokes that both made me laugh and surprised me….that she would tell such jokes to me.  Of course, I was 21 or so at the time so in retrospect, it wasn’t a mystery why she shared them with me.  I think she knew we were much alike.  I miss them.  I miss them all.

Feels Like Home to Me
Bonnie Rait/Randy Newman (from Faust)