He was a good man

I'm listening to his music from the celebration as I do most Sundays, allowing moisture to seep out when it will,  cleaning up from a cooking spree last night.   Things are good.  With a lot of "help from my friends" I'm clearing, cleaning, finishing, sorting.   getting ready for Winter.

I'm finding a balance of alone and communing, busy and open to ?.  I'm learning, paying attention to my body, my hips/knee, trying to figure out what the heck helps, hurts, can be bourn with out harm.   I'm falling into routines of food, watching Netflicks (always open for suggestions!) reading, dreaming, "getting things done".
 
And I miss him.  So much sometimes that it knocks my socks off.   Perhaps the time and distance allow how hard these last few years were and how much I was losing him to the fog, to fade into the past .  I'm left with the overwhelming awareness that he was a good man, something I appreciated less and less as we silted down into just surviving day to day.

I can't go back in time and tap myself on the shoulder and say "pay attention, this man, this relationship,  this time is GOOD, don't go back to sleep".    I am trying to appreciate what I have now, the farm, the friends and neighbors, family, $ and health enough to do and be wonderful things.  But he is no longer here
and I miss him so much.  I'm trying to appreciate the pain of missing him  too.

Dogs barking at the moon

I've been cooking up a storm these last few days. I hosted  a birthday party for the mom of our Uruguayan family who will be returning to Uruguay this November.  There were three families with kids and assorted other adult friends, an outdoor grill and all the magical lights left over from the Gil celebration.  After they all left sated with meat and cake, the dogs were barking at the moon and coyotes chimed in a chorus.  I felt like joining them.  I'm starting to feel that I am a small part, a member of several families,"packs", and  I feel my packs' caring and compensating for me as a slightly disabled elder.  My neighbors have been providing the energy and discipline to plow through the (despair inducing) basement back room and on to cleansing out all the residue left in the top part of the barn by various renters and family over the years.  We're going to set up a community wood working shop there in the barn with all my wonderful unused shop tools and gorgeous wood. Though I can't do the heavy lifting,  I have my role, my contributions.

I feel like I'm becoming aware in a deep part of my body of being part of packs, sort of the way years ago I became aware of being "a wild thing amongst wild things".  Out on the farm in Bell Center, before Adam was born, I noticed I was feeling anxious walking down to shut up the chicken house door after dark. When I asked myself why, I thought "I'm scared of the wild things".  An answering voice in my head said "but you are a wild thing too, with brains and tools instead of tooth and claw, you are a wild thing amongst wild things", and I haven't been afraid of the dark since.
This shift is from feeling separate, alone, to feeling as though I am sought after to fill a niche in a group being, a pack.  Perhaps others have felt this way about me for a long time, but I am only now relaxing into being a small part of a whole rather than independent/self sufficient.  In the past I feared being a burden or dependent.  For whatever reason, it now feels as though my gifts season, bring out the flavor in the gifts of the rest of my packs.  Together we are more than the sum of our parts, and able to feel the joy of pursuing together whatever dream is on the wind of the moment, amplifying each other's voices as we bark at the moon.