Parachuting in from my desperately overfull real world to touch base with you all, to say that yes, I am still here. Feathers (if I were a bird) ruffled, fur (if I were a cat) stroked backwards, the opposite of easy in my mind.
It’s been an eventful month, March 2018 has. Some good stuff, some blissfully funny, some simply bad, some desperately sad.
As regular readers of these posts know, early on in the month I crashed my car (bad!) but everyone involved came away mostly unscathed (good!) Which I think rather started things; it’s been roller-coastering ever since.
Subsequently we’ve all sorts of out of the ordinary things happening, too many to detail, but here are a few examples.
There’ve been a series of vet visits with a couple of our problem creatures: an elderly farm dog with a knack for raising the ire of the cow with the most accurate dog-bashing kick, and a stray cat who wandered in and won our hearts, to the extent that we have officially adopted him and set in process that whole thing where he’s being vet-inspected and neutered and vaccinated and then introduced properly to the rest of the very well-entrenched cat tribe. All seemed well, but then the poor fellow started up an infection from an old war wound, plus he developed a vaccine reaction, necessitating multiple extra veterinary visits, dollars being tossed about with wild abandon. No good deed goes unpunished, I guess – isn’t that how the story goes?
The very weather has been messing with us. It’s been unseasonably cold many days, and very snowy. But then one warm day last week some of that snow melted too fast, and our road washed out. (It’s now fixed.)
Another blip, as we almost ran out of firewood for our plant nursery greenhouses, when our usually reliable wood guy broke down one weekend and then fell ill with the flu the next. We’ve managed to forage a load ourselves to keep things going, but the stack is getting mighty small – a more than niggling worry. Tonight the forecast is for minus 14 degrees Celsius, which means one of us will be up in the wee hours, putting more of that precious wood on the stoves and tinkering with the fans.
Al of this stuff has turned out to be utterly trivial, though, as something truly awful has happened, putting all this day-to-day fussing and fretting into absolute perspective.
The phone rang several mornings ago, with my elderly mother-in-law on the line. My husband’s oldest sister had just died, very suddenly. She had been having some health issues with a lung condition, but it had seemed to be under control.
We’re all still in a state of shock, I think, trying to process the news. So very unexpected.
What fragile things our lives are. Take nothing for granted, it can change in a second.
Please go give your close-by dear ones a hug, and maybe call those far away.
Here’s hoping my next post will be an utterly mundane thing about books. Well, April is a whole new month, isn’t it?
Wishing you all a peaceful and happy Easter (for those that celebrate it), and a kindly spring, as the days get longer and the warm time comes again. Except of course for those in the other hemisphere – best wishes for a gentle seasonal change where you are, too.
One foot after the other, keep stepping along.
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