THE WRITINGS OF A WANDERING WIDOW: Do you know what today is? Today was your future yesterday!

Today was your future, yesterday.

Welcome September! Growing up in Illinois, fall became my favorite time of the year. I welcomed the brisk, crisp air after the long, hot and humid summer, a season when my sis and I would rake up the musky leaves, amassing their shades of red and gold and earthen browns into towering heaps that made the most perfect of world of tunnels.

And when the afternoon shadows stretched across the lawn, the fresh fallen leaves crunched as we fell backwards onto their bed. And then we wasted the afternoon away while we studied the magical clouds as they painted kittens and puppies and lions across the backdrop of a perfectly blue sky.

For the past four years, I have planned my road trips so that I would arrive in Illinois to enjoy fall’s rapture.

But today, as fortunate as I am to be savoring the sound of the crashing coastal waves of the Pacific as I write to you, I am saddened that this 2020 fall season I will be missing the experience of reliving my childhood memories … and also regretting that I never packed a rake on one of those visits.

Missed opportunities. I vow here and now! Next year I'm bring a rake!

During today's trying times, when I've considered the adventures that I believe I am missing, I have become engaged in a brawl between clinging to my optimism, or joining the vast crowds of the bitter and blaming.

This girl, whom you all have called inspirational, a firecracker, and an adrenaline junkie, feels as if she’s been at war with her soul.

At first, in March, I relished the chance to waste my days away, dreaming of tomorrow when things would go back to normal. I treated the stay-in-place order like I had the long, humid Illinois summers. I waited for the misery to pass. I made the best of it.

Through the month of April I grabbed hold of the opportunity to write day and night undisturbed. April became my adult version of lying in a bed of fresh fallen leaves and getting lost in the journey of the clouds.

But soon my patience waned and the thunderous clouds of anger, hate, negativity and fear shadowed me everywhere I went. The new limiting circumstances made it impossible to escape. It seemed as if there was nowhere to go.

And now it is September, and even though I am enjoying fall in Oregon, my heart yearns for the classical season of an Illinois fall.

What to do?

With only four months left of this unusual year, I am ready to rake up the last six months of claustrophobia, loneliness, anger and regret, gather up the multitude of mixed emotions into a heap,

and then,

like my childhood pile of old musky dead leaves …

Jump in!

This novel experience that we all are sharing? I say, it is like Bette Midler’s, song, The Rose. This untried and unfamiliar encounter is not a river made to drown us, nor a razor leaving us to bleed, nor does it have the power to fill us with a hunger or aching need. Instead, it is a season of transformation, like the fall.

Perhaps we are experiencing is an audition, a shakedown, a prelude for a glory even more spectacular than Bette Midler’s The Rose.

When the trees bare their leaves, I do not see the leaf’s demise as a death, or the forest’s appearance as stark. Instead I choose to see the trees have offered up a gift of gratefulness, for the summers’ nurturing heat that contributed to their abundance of fruit … and thus, their seeds to be strewn upon the ground.

Do they know that through their sacrifice, they will become heroes in the spring? Do they know their blanket of warmth across the cold barren ground offers an opportunity in the spring for The Rose to perform its miracle?

I look back upon the big picture of my life, and the struggles I thought I would never be able to endure, and yet somehow, I did.

All of those troubles and tragedies brought me here, to this life I am living, a life I love. A life created out of the ashes of my troubles that I could never have imagined.

So, I will confront this novel unknown as I have always done. I will refuse to be afraid of a heartache, or to learn to dance, or to take a chance. I will not be so afraid of dying that I forget to live.

So who's with me? I say, “Bring it on! Show me what you’ve got!”

Oh, the new friends you will make!

Oh, the people we will meet and the miracles we will create!

We are all under the same blanket of fear. Let's not see it only as dead smelly leaves. For me, I’m changing my perspective. This season, which yesterday seemed dire, I now see as a promise and we are the seeds.

And if we are the seeds, then we are also the future. We are full of tomorrows which are offering us unlimited opportunities. And through these opportunities we will be transformed into someone more amazing than we were yesterday.

Making Friends while riding the rails in Ione, Washington.

Sportster is winning friends (meet Tadd) and influencing people in Kalispell, Montana while our new refrigerator is being installed at Gardner's RV .
.

How long will it take? Who knows? But the journey is an exciting challenge and the makeover will be spectacular!

Today is the first day of your future.

The Rose

Bette Midler

Some say love, it is a river, that drowns the tender reed
Some say love, it is a razor, that leaves your soul to bleed
Some say love, it is a hunger, an endless aching need
I say love, it is a flower, and you, its only seed

It's the heart afraid of breaking, that never learns to dance
It's the dream afraid of waking, that never takes the chance
It's the one who won't be taken, who cannot seem to give
And the soul afraid of dying, that never learns to live

When the night has been too lonely and the road has been too long
And you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong
Just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows
Lies the seed, that with the sun's love in the spring becomes the rose.

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