Losses and Founds...

OK. It is less than 48 hours until the movers get here and start packing up my house. I have been clearing, sorting and redistributing or scrapping all the junk I have accumulated in nearly 20 years here. I've run across things I havent seen since I moved into this house, like some photos from a previous life (mine) and a trunk of clothes from the 80s. That is one of many examples.

On the l0ss side, my myriad hyacinths are just emerging, some of the 400 bulbs I planted last fall, which I will never see bloom. The species crocus are blooming in my perennial garden, and robins are back en mass. But it the trees..these magnificent 200+ yr old oak trees that I hear calling me, asking me how I can leave them, and I dont have an answer. I hear the creak of the wood, the sounds of living here, the sounds of my home. I am feeling the loss of this place on the planet. The only place I ever called HOME. These feelings suck. They suck. It sucks.

Now on the plus side, as there always is one, I found a few treasures that I thought were long gone. A blue topaz ring showed up. Not that I cared much for it, but I wondered where it went and imagined that other things had happened to it, not just being re-assigned a spot among myriad junk. I found my poetry folder, for which I'd grieved. I thought it was thrown away in a previous cleaning frenzy and even accused hub of trashing a huge part of my life. Oops. (Well, he was the one who put it in with unrelated things.) I found photos of dead relatives, younger us, younger me. I cant find my teddy bear from infancy, nor my baby shoes. I cant find some old love letters that I received in my late teens, early 20s. I cant find Christy in anything. My beloved Christy. The only one of my most sacred, treasured friends, that I truly lost through no fault of my own. I still miss her and I ache more now. She found me in Michigan nearly ten years ago...and I had her for about a year then. Suddenly poof. She was gone again. She'll never find me in the Ozarks. She always could rely on finding me here...

So, my birthday is in 7 days. I will turn 50. I will probably be in Arkansas on that day, or maybe not. Who knows. What I do know, is that this is a tough start to the second half-century of my time on this planet.