This morning when I sat down to read the paper, I noticed that the room was gloomy.  I hadn’t opened the blinds or gone out the back door in five days...because I didn’t have a dog to let out.  I might as well not have a back yard!!

So I opened the blinds and let the sunshine in.  I will go outside in the back yard come spring...I’m going to be a dope and try to plant okra again.  It will give me a reason to enjoy the back yard.  I worked really hard planting shrubs, astilbe, iris, asparagus, silver mound and purple clover...so I will try to keep it going another year!  

The weather has been so odd this year that I am surprised that any of it lived.  I had Ron cut the barberry back to the ground, it was 9 feet high and had taken over the flower bed.  It has already started to sprout again.  Life continues...I am better today, just still so sad.

The worst part is when I come home from somewhere and nobody greets me at the door.  For two days I thought I was never going to stop crying.  But today, I am just horribly sad.  I know that is the way it is going to be.  Sad, and lonesome.

I realized that since 1970 when Ken got back from Viet Nam, I haven’t had to go to bed by myself.  That’s fifty-two years.  Friday, Saturday and Sunday night I kept reaching out to see if Squig was there.  I know why a stuffed bear brings a little comfort.  I kept hugging my pillow.

Grief is one of the ways we know there is a God.  Only He understands where grief comes from.  When I have prayed these last few days, I have asked Him how he stands the death of all the people who reject his love.  I am reminded of the scripture that says, “What is man that you are mindful of him...?”  Why did God knowingly invent, create, people that have the capacity to break His heart?  It makes no sense.  Maybe that’s what love is.

My grandson David helped me bury Squig this morning.  I can’t stop crying.

Squig was so sick in the night, I held him...quietly, he looked in my eyes saying, “I trust you.”  It was time.  He let me hold him like that, until it was over. He just quietly waited on me. 

I’ve never cried like this in my life.  I think it is because everyone else that I have loved went in their own time.  Squig was depending on me to stop his suffering.  He just lay in my arms waiting.  He was ready, I wasn’t.

The vet who has cared for him this last year told me, “You have done a remarkable job of caring for this little dog through his illness...”  It didn’t help much.”  I did my best...it just wasn’t good enough.  The only thing that makes it bearable is that he is with God and like all the ones I have ever loved, I will hold them all again.

Here’s my advice for the day.  If you have a craving for lobster, don’t buy one of those packs of frozen packs of claws.  I succumbed, and when I tried to break them open, I found out why they were so cheap.  It took a hammer.  I had to go outside in the cold and crack them on concrete!

Carolyn had bought me some lobster thing-a-ma-jigs you break them open with years ago because she knew how addicted to lobster I was. (The guys used to take night flight time--which they had to get so many hours in--to fly to Maine and come back with the plane hold full of lobster)  But the lobster clamps couldn’t touch the shells they were so hard.

And when I finally got the meat soaked in butter, they were awful.  I threw it out.  And I never, never throw food out.  So, hearing all that, I’ve saved all of you from trying lobster that way.  Go to Red Lobster if you first hock your jewelry.

Monday.  What will I do this week?  I would never have asked myself that question ten or twenty years ago.  Maybe instead of “what will,” I should think “what can” I do this week!  The options are getting fewer and fewer.

Sunday, my class taught me that instead of trying to lift the big black bag out of the trash, I should turn the container on its side and pull the bag out.  Duh!!!  Why don’t I think of these things.  We do what we’ve always done without thinking about it until we can’t do it any more.

Like I’ve said in the past...all the people who have found easier ways to do things at this age have gone on to glory.  I’m learning.  I know I can’t lift a trash bag up and out of the container anymore.  Jeanine, my friend across the street will get the trash to the street.  She doesn’t have much and so she brings hers over and we just use one trash container.  One step at a time I’m learning stuff.

I lose my phone at least once a day.  Usually I can retrace my path and find it...if I can remember my path!!  It is very traumatic.

Today, I went to breakfast with Ann--as usual on Fridays.  We were on the way home and I realized I couldn’t find my phone.  We went back to everywhere we had been and I remembered I had sat down to wait on her on a sofa at one of the places.

And Ann...kind soul that she is to me...went back in so I wouldn’t have to walk and tear up the pain in my back.  She called my phone when she went into the place and sure enough, the phone had fallen out of the side of my purse and slipped under the cushions on the sofa I had been sitting on.

Thank the good Lord that the sofa hadn’t been sold yet.  I have got to start asking myself every time I move from one place to another...”do you have your phone?”  It is amazing how dependent we have become on our cell phones.  It is now my true brain storage place.

I think I skipped a day of posting.  Any more, I don’t even know when I do that!  I’ve been driving myself nuts editing.

My friend Carolyn was blessed by God with the gift of discernment.  Last night, in despair, I told her, “I can’t do this anymore.”  She said, “Janie, you are a great writer, but you are editing the wrong book and making yourself sick.  Stop it.”

  

Just like that!  She knows me really well.  First: encouragement--you are a good writer.  Second: You are stressing yourself over something you don’t want to do and wasting time on the wrong thing.  And third:  Stop it.

I went to bed last night with a light heart and didn’t need anti-acids.  I woke up this morning ready to edit what I’ve been wanting to edit instead of facing a job I was doing for a publisher I don’t know.  Thank God for friends.  They see right through us to the problems.