Where to begin … ?

First of all, I want to share that I’ve had the amazing experience of growing closer to some of my blog friends even when I wasn’t actively blogging. Last November, I posted about online friendships … and life promptly went on to confirm my thoughts. Over the months when I wasn’t able to blog, I still chatted with some of you quite often … daily even. It’s been wonderful, warm and uplifting! Not sure what I would have done without the companionship. Thank you.

I guess the next thing I should share is just a bit of newsy stuff. The son who was missing last fall is home now, and seems to be pulling his life together. I guess that the problems he was facing last fall have eased, and he’s been able to relax just a bit. He just graced me with wild roses in a glass two weeks in a row. Motherhood has its perks! ;o)

Another positive event … a neighbor showed up about a month ago and harrowed our garden area. We have a garden for the first time in 3 years. I’m spending the better part of my time pulling weeds. The garden is between 8,500 and 9,000 square feet, and there’s mostly just Doug and I working in it, so the weeds are really getting ahead of us fast, but I think we’ll still have a decent load of veggies at the end of the summer. I hope to have time to make salsa this fall … mmmmmm …. I’ll blog about it, if I do. Also intend to post photos of the garden as the season progresses.

In another month, we’ll be heading for camp. I will be having quite a bit of company almost as soon as I get there, and I hope to have time to take photos and share the adventures with you. An old friend from PA and his family will be joining me for a few days, my dear friend Joanie and her Mum will be visiting me, and hopefully, a very good friend from my ministry days will visit for a week. I’m really looking forward to it!

Finally, a patient blog update. When I saw my primary care doc a few weeks ago, I found out that I’m creeping toward stage 5 kidney failure, and unless it bounces back up a bit for a while longer, I’ll probably have decisions to make about dialysis the next time I see my nephrologist. I knew it would come to this eventually, but being faced with the prospect isn’t quite the same as anticipating it from a distance. Things could improve again for a while … it’s a see-saw with a mind of its own.

In the next week, I intend to post some garden pics for all of you out there with a green thumb. Need some sunshine though … we’ve had a lot of roving thunderstorms. Think SUN! ;o)

This afternoon, I found two emails in my inbox … one right next to the other. One came in at 2:33 PM – that one was from Pattie, the Domesticator. The second one came 3 minutes later, and it was from Vijay.

Both of them were comments that were forwarded to me from the blog.

Pattie’s comment:

Ok….it’s been a month since my last comment….A Month!

Are you coming back? I miss you *sniff*

And Vijay’s:

A little more than a month since my last comment.

Anyone see a parallel here? Maybe a theme, even? I bet they discussed this on the sly before posting, eh? I mean, DUDE! Three minutes apart, even! If it were a baby, it would have been born seconds later! ;o)

Seriously though … I apologize to everyone for being gone so long. In the past, I’ve written some starkly honest posts, but the really intense posts, full of raw honesty, dealt with things that happened many years ago. Time had dulled the edge of the associated ouch, and I could write about the horrible events of the past from the perspective of someone who’s seen how the story ends, and has gone over it so often that the area is largely numb. I could use my past as a tool to perhaps free someone else in the present, because it was a course I’d already graduated from.

However, the position I find myself in right now is not quite as cut and dry, and I’m not at all removed from the situation by the anesthetizing ministrations of time. Worse still – I have no idea how it all ends.

Being that I’m not as brave as a certain Australian doc we all know and love, I haven’t got any real revelations to share. I will just say that the events of last fall, which piled up on top of some rather difficult ongoing circumstances, followed me like a pack of pertinacious black hounds into a long, dark, cold, and paralyzing winter. You would seriously not have wanted to read anything I’d written over the winter, believe me.

The gentle, but vibrant, hues of summer, and the sun’s healing warmth, are bringing me back to life a bit again. It’s like taking a long drink of cold fresh water after crossing a seemingly endless desert. As affective as the summer is, however, I know that it’s only a partial (and temporary) reprieve from some very serious and ongoing situations. Blogging with any regularity would be very difficult for me right now. Please continue to be patient with me – I don’t intend to be gone forever.

Thank you all for your concern. It’s been a shelter from the cold for me, even when I couldn’t reply.

Next week I have finals in my current course, and the week after that is one of the two free weeks the school gives us every year. If possible, I will take a bit of that time to do some patient blogging.