A thought crossed my mind yesterday at the mall while I was learning how to navigate using my newly acquired head array multifunction technology. Everything I seek and everything I now own is a device designed to accommodate infirmity, enable transportation or aid communication. Everything I had prior to my illness is gone. My career, my tools of the trade, my home in Peoria, my garden and back yard, the front porch where I had coffee and read the paper, the kitchen where I loved to cook, my Taekwondo students and friends, my work friends, my musician friends, my Land Rover, Jaguar, my treadmill, my lunches at the Dollar, my family, my everything.
All of my former life is a memory of wanting. I need to better grasp the reality that the material comforts of my past are gone forever and that the friends and family will always be there, whether in memory or in the flesh.
When I visit Peoria in August I will be stepping back in time for the real tangibles- friends and family- not a bunch of "stuff". I should take like assessment of my current life.
All of my former life is a memory of wanting. I need to better grasp the reality that the material comforts of my past are gone forever and that the friends and family will always be there, whether in memory or in the flesh.
When I visit Peoria in August I will be stepping back in time for the real tangibles- friends and family- not a bunch of "stuff". I should take like assessment of my current life.
Well, I am too busy counting what we have gained to waste too much focus on what we have let go to make our lives more enjoyable here. I have not LOST my family. They are there and we communicate regularly.
ReplyDeleteIn Peoria you on a weekly basis broke a tool or replaced something at home for a newer better version and I often wondered that you didn't trade ME in for a newer model. While I held on to my old van, fighting with you monthly to keep and repair it instead of replace it for the latest hot thing.
Yes, I miss the home we shared in P Town with all our friends and fun but maybe for a few minutes you could wax on about our beautiful grand boys and our beautiful house in our beautiful neighborhood with our wonderful neighbors and great weather and health services.
Just a thought.
I appreciate your sentiment, oh loved one, though the very essence of this post resonates the fact that friends, family and relationships allow for the discardment of all material devices. I was blessed, I am blessed and I love you.
ReplyDeleteAaannnnd as you two wax on, wax off about stuff we will all just laugh about it. Tracy, I felt the same way about leaving our family home albiet for different reasons it was still quite traumatic. Our old home is now about 140-something years old and just the memories of what it looked like when we bought it and then what we turned it into still makes me proud. Ahhh, the years of walking around with drywall mud and spackling in my hair, going into church and being told I have paint on the back of my sleeve, rushing uptown to the clinic for a wound check and tetanus shot after stabbing a chisel into the palm of my hand trying to rehang weights on window sashes, lead paint, asbestos tile, stripping woodwork, water leaking in through the kitchen light on the bottom floor of the house while we were moving in, an immediate new roof with a 12/12 pitch.......yeeeaaa, the good times. It's also the place we lived when we got married, raised our children, and essentially learned how to be "adults". (I still question that part. haha) Now that we built a new home we can actually relax and enjoy the place without picking at it or having to replace anything. I guess their is some truth in the statement, "Absence makes the heart grow fonder". Give it some time Tracy, it will all grow on you!
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