Indulge your imagination in every possible flight.
Jane Austen
Tags: Quoting
One of the qualities that you can develop, particularly in your older years, is a sense of great compassion for yourself. When you visit the wounds within the temple of memory, you should not blame yourself for making bad mistakes that you greatly regret. Sometimes you have grown unexpectedly through these mistakes. Frequently, in a journey of the soul, the most precious moments are the mistakes. They have brought you to a place that you would otherwise have always avoided. You should bring a compassionate mindfulness to your mistakes and wounds. Endeavor to inhabit the rhythm you were in at that time. If you visit this configuration of your soul with forgiveness in your heart, it will fall into place itself. When you forgive yourself, the inner wounds begin to heal. You come in out of the exile of hurt into the joy of inner belonging.
John O’Donohue
Tags: Quoting
I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don’t want to look around any more: I don’t need to look around for anything.
Sylvia Plath
Tags: Quoting
I got new shoes! I’ve loved loafers the whole of my life and have had a veritable rainbow over the years, but never this shade of green, so there you go. They are Solovairs should you have any interest in the same. I get no graft if you make a purchase, just the pleasure of knowing you made a great decision.
Fall colors continue to dazzle in the back garden. Enjoy…
Also back garden related, before the first frost, Greg picked the last of the peppers and tomatoes, mostly green, some red. We made more cowboy candy with the peppers, me slicing, Greg preserving, and, thankfully, they are not nearly as spicy as the last lot. There were quite a few tomatoes, so I did some interweb searches for ideas. First, I decided on a green tomato chutney, for which I am waiting on organic golden raisins, so I’ll let you know about that later.
This ugly concoction is a marmalade gotten from the New York Times. I thoroughly perused the comments and determined an additional lemon was key to flavor. Sweet baby Jesus, this stuff is delicious! Should we be lucky enough to have another nice haul of tomatoes next year, I will make it again, most definitely, with one change. It called for thin lemon slices, but I’d prefer them quartered, as there would be a more even distribution of flavor and easier to manage with the spoon. Done and done.
Hey! It’s the handsome hubster! He and I were assembling a box spring for a new mattress in the guest room, which is not super large, hence the trail of cardboard.
I’ve started sleeping here most nights, but before you fret about it, know that we don’t AT ALL. It became necessary, as we both want decent rest on the regular, and it just wasn’t happening. Last year, we learned Greg has sleep apnea, generally stopping breathing about 200 times a night, which he was pretty devil may care about while it scared the shit out of me. I mean, seriously, 200 times a night!
He got a C-PAP machine, and it was pretty great, at least initially, because I wasn’t waking up with his crazy loud snores (even with earplugs), and he was consistently breathing. But then, his mask was causing his teeth to hurt, which is super common, so he switched to a small one that fit strictly over his nose. Great for him, but if he opened his mouth, even a little, it was this loud mini-hurricane blasting and waking me up, and I needed the earplugs again. After a while, it became clear this was unsustainable, because my ears were getting more and more irritated after years of nightly usage, and we really didn’t want his teeth to hurt.
So, I tried a night in the guest room and woke up ridiculously refreshed, despite the bed not being as firm as our ours. The deal was sealed, and we replaced the mattress. Save the nights when my hormones aren’t interrupting, my sleep is very, very good. His, too. As a sweet compromise for that old time feeling, we sleep together on the weekend. Hooray!
Sometimes we feel sad about it because, you know, we’ve been together for 33 years and kind of like each other and cuddling and our ritual chatting and hand-holding while drifting off to sleep routine. There is great consolation in Greg being my personal alarm, coming down for a morning cuddle before we start our collective day. It’s pretty perfect, all things considered.
