Clearing Up

For a very long time now, there is something I wanted to change.  The task seemed a bit insurmountable.  I need a piece of heavy machinery. The reason for doing this was that this obstacle was affecting my feng shui.  It is never a good idea to have something massage blocking your entrance to abundance.

As good fortune would have it, I found someone who could possibly do the job.  He was busy excavating land for a new home is being constructed just outside my development.  Having passed the construction site numerous times, it was never the right time to talk to the excavator.  Until today.

I've been asking for help with this project.  Waiting for the time when the forces necessary came together.  Just after returning from lunch with a friend, I drove into my community and saw the excavator hard at work.  There were lots of noises in this area, especially the generator.  I knew none of the four men working would hear me.  Or see me.  I pulled my car as far over to the right of the narrow entrance to my community as I could safely. Then I waited and waited. The crew was completely enmeshed in their work.  After a while, the excavator looked my way.  Perhaps it was my moving hands flagging him down?

He moved his small backhoe close to the stream where I was standing, on the other side from him.  Behind the barbed wire so he could hear me.

"I would like to have a boulder moved," I asked.

After some talk, he said he would come right up which he did.  Assessing the job, he returned with the backhoe and proceeded to pull the six hundred boulder boulder with the shovel to his backhoe.

It is the small things that have always made me happy.  Soon I will hire someone to smooth back the area.  For now, the area is lined with grass seed.  Spring can't be far away.

Soon.

Happy Everything

As the year comes to a close, it is a time to pause.

So much happened this past year, I am challenged to put it to words.

This says it all.

Happy Everything.

No Christmas

I was more excited than usual thinking about Christmas.  For one, it would be the first time both of my children and I and their families were together in the past year.  Since Christmas of 2014.  It was also the last time we would be together before my daughter has her first baby.  It meant a lot to me.  But as things go in this world, expectations don't often pan out.  This was the case this year.

I hadn't been in New Hampshire more than twenty-four hours when I started getting sick.  I had never been sick on Christmas before.  Ever.  Friends knew what this year meant to me and called to see how it was going.  Well, that began a bit of a landslide of conern. There is nothing like a phone call.  Intonation, listening for clues, it says it all.

"You know you are puking your heart out," she said.

Words could not be more true. Time.  It is all we have anyway.

Use it well.

Christmas

As a child, Christmas was filled with anticipation, smells coming from the kitchen days and weeks before the holiday.  My grandparents would come over along with my bachelor uncle.  It always felt so good to have my family around.

Dad would be busy fixing the lights, setting up the train, repairing the train so that it would make a few rounds on the track.

My brother and I often peaked into the wrapped presents which Mom would position on the table near the Christmas tree in our downstairs recreation room.  When we were older.

Dad took off that year and Christmas was quiet.  In truth it had been quiet years before.  I was glad things were as good as they were.  The following couple of years, my brother moved away.   Forever. He would come home once in the summer and we wouldn't hear from him for months.

In the many years to follow, I would return to Mom's.  She had remarried and moved into her husband's home some thirty minutes to the west of us.  By that time, I had married and had children of my own.  For many years, we would make the trek back to Moms.  Even when we moved seven hours away.  We always came home.

My senior relatives have passed.  My children have grown and moved away.  They have families of their own.  Christmas still holds the same magic.  The traditions matter less.  Being together as a complete family is everything.

In two days I will see them all again.  For the first time in a year, all of us will be together.  A baby is on the way and that is the best gift I could ever have.

Soon.