The List

Another day has dawned.

I am sleeping four consecutive hours at night, and dozing off occasionally after that, until I get tired of thinking and hurting, so I get up. This morning I arose at 4:30 a.m., having been awake for quite some time. Sleep is the real challenge right now. The nausea has subsided, and I can eat small meals. I try to focus on eating vegetables, as it is all to easy to just eat bread and peanut butter, or cheese and crackers, which are acceptable, but certainly don’t represent a healthy diet. I keep a beverage beside me at all times, sipping frequently, as it would be very easy to become dehydrated right now, I cry so much. These are the basics I am attempting to establish right now.

Yesterday I was able to stabilize myself enough to spend 25 minutes on the elliptical machine, the first exercise I have had since December 29th, 2017. Hopefully I can get back into doing this regularly. I am starting to think again about food, planning meals for myself. I am very glad to have these kinds of thoughts coming into my head!

It is snowing heavily today, the cold snap has abated, for a few days, to return at the end of the week. With the warmer weather comes the white fluffy stuff from the sky. I anticipate shovelling snow this afternoon.

The day looms ahead of me. I am keeping a list of obvious things to do, because my emotional state is still all over the place, and I find myself in pain, and at a loss as to what to do next. Picking something from the list alleviates a lot of distress for me, allowing me not to think, and right now thinking is not always my friend. The list is a solid, reliable thing, that gives me logical choices. I write the list in my brief moments of clarity. Today might include picking up a prescription, and printing some required files, that sort of thing.

Vegetable soup was on my list, so that is how the morning will be spent. When making vegetable soup, I add the basic ingredients for the recipe, and then continue to add more vegetables until the soup pot is almost full. Then it simmers on the lowest temperature on the range, all day long. A batch of chocolate cherry muffins has been baked, and sits cooling on the kitchen counter. Now I have food to tempt me into eating, which right now, is a very good thing.………

I just looked a an old photograph, from the 30s or 40s, in Ontario, Canada, of a woman in a flowered dress, her hair caught up in a bun, standing on the weathered boards of a covered porch, hanging laundry out to dry on a line to the porch. This photograph, particularly the weathered boards of the deck of the porch, elicited in me a deep feeling of contentment, of rightness in the world, of love for the simple functional elements of daily life in times gone by. My Granny and Grandpa’s front porch had similar decking, and oh what heaven it would be, to sit on a worn wooden chair there again with Granny sitting beside me, shelling garden peas.

Worldly Distractions

Weather

-6°C
Date: 7:00 AM EST Wednesday 3 January 2018
Condition: Light Snow
Pressure: 102.0 kPa
Tendency: Falling
Temperature: -6.2°C
Dew point: -9.2°C
Humidity: 79%
Wind: SW 34 gust 54 km/h
Wind Chill: -15
Visibility: 5 km

Quote

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”
Edwin Schlossberg

I like this quote, not so much in the medium of my own writing, but more in my pleasure in reading the writing of others.