Hiding Places

I've always loved hiding places outside. When I was a child, my favorite place was deep within the bushes on the corner of the street I lived on. There weren't any children my age in that family so I wasn't exactly an invited guest in the hide away but it was such a large expanse of overgrown bushes that I could crawl in and create my own world without anyone knowing that I was there. This time of year, my back yard is full of places like that. The main problem I have is not wanting to scare other animals and infringe on their hidey holes. Too bad they can't read. I could hang a sign around my neck and say, I'm a fellow creature looking for a safe place to regroup. I've mentioned before how I've always stopped to smell the flowers, heck, sometimes I wish I could jump into a flower and blend like the butterflies do. Today is my daughter's last day at home before she leaves for the long drive to the midwest where she'll be going to law school. I took some last day at home photos because I doubt either of us will be in the mood at 5:00 am when she leaves in the morning. It's funny because her room is getting pretty empty but the picture of her in the guest room where all her boxes and suitcases are at the ready for loading shows how much stuff has come out of her room bound for a medium size car. The big crossing of fingers at the moment is that she'll be able to fit everything in the car but in the scheme of things that's obviously a minor issue. Sometimes everything is minor, even big things. I've grappled with that concept long before I got to know so many courageous people of all ages in the thick of their battle to beat the odds with melanoma. I remember when my Godmother and mother died within a year of each other, I felt a certain amount of guilt about the depth of my grief. A woman I had gotten to be friends with when we worked together, lost a teenaged son in an automobile accident when I was in the middle of the grief process for my losses. I didn't articulate this to anyone but it bothered me that I couldn't seem to shake my depression after my mom died when I knew someone who was surviving the loss of a child. Besides the obvious fact that depression isn't about logic, loss isn't either. Obviously, in the scheme of things, we should all live normal life spans and younger people should never go first but that's not the way it is and losing people we love to death is almost always hard. Not sure what got me thinking about that. I guess it's because I've been a little worried about my daughter's 15 hour drive tomorrow and how she'll barely catch her breath before the summer session begins this coming monday. The minute that thought crosses my mind though I feel ridiculous when I think about the parents of children who die at a much younger age than my daughter is. This whole train of thought is ridiculous. It's not like life if a bartering process where we can say, I'll take a triple helping of ordinary stress if you'll make everything okay for people facing the worse things. In odd ways though I am more relaxed about everything the older I get. I know that some things have to be taken as they come. I was even able to laugh about something that made me a little insecure in terms of my job and realize it was an innocent mistake. I've worked for the same company for close to 10 years and since 2000, they have let me work primarily from home and keep a full time position. The company has grown so much that most people don't know me. I'll be working on a new project with people I don't know and have to physically go to my office Monday and get training for the new task but after that will be able to continue working from home. An email circulated that there were two new hires who would be at the office for training. I was listed as one of the new hires. The person who wrote the email isn't my PD and this is a situation where I'm being loaned to help out in a pinch but the point is it dawned on me that I've worked at the same place all these years and most of the people that work there are new since I stopped having to be physically at the office. The result of that is that in this case, through miscommunication I suppose, the person who will be going over the work with me thought I was a brand new employee. For the most part, I'm laughing. My solution to PVC pipes is making me laugh. I don't like the PVC pipes in certain parts of my garden which have function but aren't very attractive. I had a bunch of burlap which I covered some of the pipes with and now they almost look like garden guards. They make me laugh and as Martha would say, that's a good thing.