Notes From A Broken Heart

You know you've met a precious friend when she tells you the lipstick intended for lips ended up on your front teeth.  Likewise, I appreciate anyone who responds to an invitation with honesty.  Specifically, I started a while back inviting your responses after you had read a Blog(s).  Now, I don't want to use "friend" casually or incorrectly.  Nor am I presumptuous enough to assume that I know each Reader, and even if I did,  I respect how you choose to react.  However, whether we've met person-to-person through these musings or not,  the invitation stands. Recently, I received fantastic feedback!  A friend I met two or three years ago shared two thoughts about the Blogs:  The font could be enlarged, and some of them were too lengthy.  Good to know! You cared enough to share.  Thank you.  I told him I could easily handle the latter, but needed expert help in dealing with font sizes.  While I can manipulate font size in a Word app, I haven't yet maste

One of the most critical lessons I'm trying to master is that of asking for help.  For years I've smiled almost smugly, when the commercial comes on that depicts the older woman who has fallen and cries,  "Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!" Rarely did I give it serious attention. hat was before I realized many people no matter the age, live alone, and not always by choice.  I   won't point a finger at the Internet because this phenomenon, this isolation, occurred long before the first computers (ones that filled a room), entered our lives.  However, I do believe computer technology and social media merged (melded?) to initiate cataclysmic changes in our lives.  Either we just didn't realize what was happening, or we skidded down a slippery slope into some kind of terminal denial. If you're not living alone the first time you hear the commercial, or you think you just love being alone, you haven't lived long enough.  That's what

It's impossible to recapture or recount the forever impact my father, Jimmie, bequeathed me.  Ours reflected a special love, perhaps because I'm the youngest of seven children. In truth,  I sincerely believe he cherished me as "the Special One"!  How ironic that after his funeral service (called "a Home Going Celebration" in our culture), each of us claimed to have been his favorite! "No, I was his favorite because..." "That's not true, because he ALWAYS told me I was his favorite..." "Oh, you're so mistaken! I know I was his favorite because we spent so much time together..." The argument swirled on, and reached its crescendo only when we all agreed not to agree. Of course, I was his favorite; I couldn't  number the times I sat on his lap as a preschooler, scrunching up so he could draw pictures for me in his "Indian Chief" notepad.  He took such painstaking care creating images

                    Compare: What happens to tears which pour forth hot and desperate? They crystallize into Stilletos of sadness                     To: Joy savored Graces And grows Getting from the first question to the second certainly takes a giant leap. It's not as simple as asking, "Mother, may I."  It involves neither games nor gamesmanship, for the journey begins in an immensity of grief and indescribable loss.  From befuddlement to belief . Courtney, the younger of two daughters, died suddenly early on a Sunday morning.  We could not say "Goodbye." No chance.  It happened so quickly.  To describe myself as bereft, forlorn, or in any of the language of grief clearly understates my anguish.  Although I wish I  could have been stricken with permanent amnesia, graphic moments still haunt me with crystal transparency.  I tried to bury memories countless times in innumerable ways; still, they intrude, more than two horrible y

Stretches (usually described as expanding, pulling, and extending parts iof the body to ease tight, tense, and taut muscles, joints, and tendons)...   "You need to stretch before you walk!" This admonition appeared like a 500 watt light bulb that had exploded like a bomb in my mind as I walked (with a great deal of stiffness that I tried with studied aplomb to camouflage), the other week. What had happened? The weather had been temperamental for several weeks. It had interrupted the daily Constitution my long-haired Dachshund, Kai, and I had engaged in last year until the stately trees that had shaded us during Summer's sun had slowly but surely shorn themselves of leaves at the nexus between end-of-Fall and onset of Winter.  In fact, the first time I walked downstairs in my favorite walking "uniform," Kai, faithful friend that he is, reacted.  He went wild and started walking in tight circles, yapping with abandon.  Excited, he followed me to the laun

"Yes, Lord, I know You've been waiting on me. "I confess I've tried to use You, conveniently and consciously, as my 24-7 scapegoat.  I have blamed all my calamities on You, and like many,  I've given credit to the devil, my sworn enemy, when You have rain goodness and blessings down. I didn't recognize this phenomenon the first and second times I read about the role of the scapegoat in the Book of Leviticus. Thank You, Holy Spirit, for connecting the back story with the flash of insight you provided as I completed my morning ablutions: washing and rinsing my body, a metaphor for spiritual and natural cleansing. Anyway, Jesus, I know You've been waiting, patiently on me to see what years of myopia had camouflaged.  "Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, Calling for you and for me; See on  the portals He's waiting and watching, Watching for you and for me. Now,  I see You.  I hear You.  You declared,  "Behold, I stand at the doo