It started here, and I’ve been walking in the subdivision across the street every morning at sunrise ever since.
Then this happened, and it caused me to climb out of bed one day and make pizza with my kids and I’ve been slowly transitioning back into mealtime ever since. Then I bought bento boxes for my kids’ lunches because I also decided to remove gluten from their diets so bye bye hassle free poison industrial complex lunch!
Now now my kids and I pack their lunches every day except when we forget and my husband ends up having to do it at the last minute in the morning, which he loves.
A body in motion stays in motion. So it is with a body, the same is true with my mind. My therapist asked me for notes so what we can make an action plan for when this happens again,so that we might shorten the lifespan of the next horror show of inactivity. It wasn’t until after I left that I made the connection between arthritis and the last several weeks of cozy bed time, but I don’t want to talk about that now.
Right now, I have a list. Everybody likes lists.
Sometimes, I feel like two people. There’s an urban Summer, who loves delivery breakfast, sidewalks, structured runs, multi-plex, manic panic, kitten heels, customer service management and power suits. Then there’s the me that lives here, now. Petulant, anti-grocery store me that wants to get her food from somewhere, anywhere but that place with those tubular lights and that cold white tile. The me that craves, all year long, the season that isn’t here. Cold in the summer, just want to shed my damn coat already in the winter. The me that tries so hard every year to turn this sand dune into something that will give us edible crops but this year is ready to give up and let the animals eat it and trade their milk to the locals who do a better job.
Today I wandered around this house full of other people’s cast offs and wondered where I fit into the world we live in, the life we’ve created, and my family’s world. Their life largely functions fine without me, by necessity of my illnesses, but the hole left when I’m absent is undeniable.
My hope is to create a different set of values for my family, and below is a partial list of the reasons why.
Because we care what’s in that biscuit, my kids should be able to pronounce all the ingredients.
Because it matters what happened to that animal before it died and ended up on our plate.
Because I was curious and I forgot, for so many years, the scent of a properly canned jar of pickles
Because after enough days in a row, kids stop asking for the remote and begin complaining when you call them inside.
Because video games and streaming movies are only for rainy days when there are no cookies to bake or fun books to read and even then, uno is a pretty fun game.
Because as far as I know, there’s never been a paper on whether severe mental illness can be treated with extreme homesteading but perhaps it’s time for one
Because who can be sad when GOATS.
And also GOATS
And also someone has to milk the GOATS.
