Thursday

Just at noon, I walked a forested path and I thought -- how easy it is to find peace here...

And I thought -- sometimes it's hard not to be grumpy. I get it. Things go wrong. We can't control it -- stuff happens. To everyone. We get angry, we get grumpy. (I heard an office worker at a residential facility screaming at someone today. I wondered -- had the woman really wronged her? Was her anger effective? Or was the world just too much and she let out a bellow, in the same way that a kettle with boiling water releases steam?)

When I was a teen, I so wanted to be the person who never gets angry. Over the decades, I lost that struggle every now and then, but in my senior years, it's not been hard to not get fired up about the indignities that befall us all. The greater challenge is to not feel or act grumpy. Ever. I want to be that person described to me by a friend whom I encountered recently. She said her mom was getting senile and frail, but she was a dotty old chipper granny. I don't mind being dotty so long as I stay chipper!



Today is stunning, weatherwise. It's right around freezing, but the sun is out and the air is calm. December perfection! (Snow would add beauty, to be sure, but we mustn't be greedy!)






It's a busy morning for me. After breakfast...





... I return to my mom's apartment.

(Here's the pretty driveby... The lake is freezing over!)





There, I again search the place inside out for her missing item. And I find it! I take this and some reading material to the Rehab Center and visit for a while. She is at an impasse, but it could be just a temporary thing. Tomorrow I'll be meeting with the team of caseworker-nurse type people to set some goals and review the possibilities.



I return home, do some quick Christmas work (all pleasure to be sure!) and wait for Ed to finish his work phone calls. The clock ticks, the calls are endless. I wave good bye and take off on my own. I cannot miss this moment of good weather.

Where to? Our county park by Lake Waubesa has it all -- water, prairie. Forest. Birds.

(Two fishing huts! Are they safe??)






(Forest calm...)






(Ducks, geese...)







Immediately after, I pick up Snowdrop...






It's the next to last day of school before winter break and I sense, for the first time, that she's looking forward to "sleeping in" next week. She is tired. At the farmhouse, she chooses mellow books for our reading time. Sweet winter stories, some of which were favorites last year, when she was only three.






I take her home toward evening. Again I linger there.

It's late when I finally pull into the farmette driveway. I bring in a supper of Thai take out. We eat it on the couch, with an eye and an ear to the political news of the day.