Time Warp

I swear, it just just Monday the day before yesterday, yet my phone insists today is already Saturday. I've noticed this phenomenon time and again over the years. Time speeds by at an ever-increasing rate, laughing at my feeble attempts to embrace today and to stay in the now.

Rumor has it I'm not alone in my time warp. And research even backs me up.

Where has this week gone?

Well, a lot of it went in the direction of Operation DoGooder. The lady at the housing complex where Kevin's application is under consideration continues to work her way through her check list. Several times in the last few weeks, she's run into a obstacles. When she finds a box she cannot check, she calls me up. I run downtown the next day to find Kevin, and take him to do whatever needs to be done to keep the process moving along.

I don't dare procrastinate after she's let me know of a problem. I know places in her building are in demand; she could throw Kevin's application in the dead file and move on in a heartbeat. Fortunately, she cuts us a little slack, and thus far, has been gracious enough to grant us the time required to come up with all the paperwork she's needed - who knew there was such a thing as a letter documenting you are homeless? Paperwork submitted, we are now back in wait mode. Fingers crossed!

There are the hours I lost to watching the sky lighten through the prism of the stained glass in the south window of my bedroom. (Time well spent, just ask me.)

I spent daylight hours on the chores I used to cram into the evening; several evenings, my newly freed time has largely filled itself with solving back editions of the New York Times crossword puzzle. I'm still not convinced it's a good idea to give me limitless access to their archives...

Oh, and walks in the park. I can go for a walk in the park just because I'm restless and need to clear the cobwebs from my brain.

I think my brain is still trying to wrap itself around my newly unstructured existence. It still thinks, if I'm not working at the computer all day, it must be the weekend. It's starting to get a little confused - this past weekend has been going on for some three weeks now. I'm beginning to realize anew that the Universe abhors a vacuum. I think I'd be well served if I learned to guard my hours the same way I guard my monies.

Perhaps I should start a new reflection at night:  Where did I spend my hours today? Did I spend them doing the things I wanted most to do? Did I waste them on the high-calorie, low-nutrition fluff and dandruff offered by internet rabbit holes, or did I spend them deliberately, on the things I wanted most to have done by the end of the day? Did I leave room for fun, for work, for exercise, for friends, for myself? How do I want to spend my hours tomorrow?

The hours I have been given are precious. That I now have the freedom to spend them as my whim moves me still boggles my mind, time warps notwithstanding.

Freedom!!!!!

November Blues

I wish Libby would send out another one of her updates.

I miss her and wonder how she is doing now.

Shortly after she died, someone asked if anyone had a compiled list of her status emails. No one had, so I compiled one for them - it's about 90 pages long. It starts with her first diagnosis and ends about a month before she died, almost a year ago. I haven't been able to bring myself to read it. Not yet. Soon.

I cried some then, but since tears have been leaking out all week, I obviously haven't begun to finish mourning her absence. When I start to cry, if I can, I crawl onto the sofa and curl up under the soft white fuzzy blanket she gave me shortly after she first got sick, after she visited and all I had for throws when she napped were the old hand-knitted kind. They were not near as soft as she wanted them to be, so she fixed that problem, she did.

I hold the softness to my face, and let my mind wander back over the times we spent together, the stories she wrote. I remember the way she railed at her fate. I remember when the whole chemo thing was too hard and she wanted to quit partway through a series and I called to try to talk her out of stopping and she yelled at me and cussed at me, and then completed the course. (Even then, we knew it wasn't going to change the end of the story, it would only extend its length.)

I remember my last visit to Minnesota to help her clean up the items on her todo list. It was just a year ago; she'd done most of the things herself, but the last turn of her illness had taken her by surprise. She'd been going along for some time, doing just fine, and then...  she wasn't.

I remember her insistence that she wasn't battling cancer, and that when she died, we were NOT to say she'd lost her battle. And I agree because cancer is not the enemy, Fear is. And while Fear struggled mightily to get her to give up the days she had, and even managed to get on top a few times, she never stayed down for long. She faced Fear down. She faced her fate with trepidation, but also with the conviction of one who believes in Life after life. She lived all of the days she was given.

I remember the last time we said goodbye.

I still struggle with a huge case of the "why not me's". We were sisters. Why did her disease lead her on an unrelenting march to death, while mine shows no evidence of returning just yet, almost eight years later?

I feel guilty, undeserving of the gift of life, as if, somehow, my survival caused her death. My head knows better, but survivor's guilt is real.

I can picture her now, yelling at me for even thinking about going down that path. If she were here, she would have none of it.

Remember the blog post I wrote early last year, where I lost some earrings, and after I asked her if she wouldn't mind helping me find them, they both turned up in the unlikeliest of places?

Well, last week, I lost another one. This time, I didn't ask for her help; I figured it was just one of those things.

And. Two days later I sat down in my rocking chair in my living room and looked at the rug - and there the missing earring was; smack dab in the middle of the room. *insert an unexpected flood of tears here*

I know, I know. There are many logical explanations for how it happened. But for today, I'm going to take the illogical route and read it as a message from her.

She is lost, yes, but also true, she is found.

Saturday, again!

I've been in a time warp this past week. Turns out, every day is Saturday.

The first two weeks of retirement went by in a blur as I spent all available daylight hours painting. Then, when I went to Alaska, well, that was vacation, so of course I didn't have to go to work.

This past week, it finally started to sink in - I'm really NOT going back to work. Not tomorrow, not later this week, not next week, not next month.

This past week, I may have been luxuriating a little overmuch as I woke up each morning when the sun came up (and not before!) and went through my mental list of 'things I'd like to get done today'. Every day, I had a list of tasks to get done. Tasks I've been cramming into my Saturdays, since I like to slack off on Sundays, and I didn't usually have the oomph to get much useful work done after I worked all day. Every day, like Saturday's past, I'd get some of the items on the list done; the rest got pushed to my next free day.

The difference is my next free day is now the next day.

I'm liking this.

That's not to say I haven't run into a few glitches. I'm having trouble talking me into turning on the computer to pay my bills, because I can do that tomorrow. Paperwork I managed to keep corralled when I had much less free time is now starting to pile up, because, surely, I'll get to it tomorrow. (Good thing bills have due dates, or I'd never get them paid.)

Laundry is in the same boat; I have clothes for one more day, so it can wait until tomorrow. Turns out, the problem there isn't running out of clothes; it's that my sheets and towels are perhaps not as fresh as they historically were. Fine. I'll do laundry tomorrow.

If every day is Saturday, what happens to my lazy Sundays?  Where do they get to fit in? As much as I don't miss them yet, I think I might need my productive Tuesdays. And Friday evenings. My hang out with my friends night. I KNOW I don't want those to fall by the wayside. Drawing on the wisdom of my friends who have retired before me, I know I'll need to build some structure into my days. It'll be down the road a ways, probably in the spring or early summer.

For now, I'm thoroughly enjoying working around the house. For the first time in ages, I'm crossing things off the list faster than I'm adding items to it! I get to go grocery shopping when Costco is quiet(er), take time for random walks in the park. I've had some time to work crossword puzzles. I used to like crossword puzzles.

The holidays are coming, then I'll spend a couple of months watching baby Joe during the day, after his mom returns to work. After he moves off to 'real' day care, I'll spend some time visiting Kate and Lexi in California.

Which gives me months and months to figure out what shape the structure will take. I figure there's no real hurry - after all, tomorrow's Saturday; I'll have time to ponder the question then.