If Change Is Growth, I'm Exploding

Change Is Growth, Or So The Saying Goes

I’m known to  spout the adage that all change is growth, and growth is to be welcomed at every stage of life.  Anyway, I believe it in my head.  Not necessarily in my bod and heart.  It’s such an emotional tug of war. 

Now that all my wonderful company are gone I’m chugging along in preparation for selling my home and moving to Oakmont in Santa Rosa either this fall or next spring.  Well, sometimes chugging; sometimes dawdling; often groaning. In retrospect, there should be a law against living in one place for 49 years.  I’m not a hoarder exactly but Lee and I are both guilty of being big time accumulators; everything from black pottery in Oaxaca, Mecico, to tiny blue ceramic  horses from San Francisco’s Japan Town. 

To complicate matters I fell last week and fractured a rib.  Even breathing makes me groan.  So my movements vary from sloth-like to snail-like.  Not that I’ve ever seen a sloth, except on tv and National Geo, but plenty of slugs ascend my bathroom window in the spring and I amuse myself by pacing them. 

Since I am using hired help to do all the grunt work you may ask me how I got the recent fracture?  I got up in the night, not out of urgency, but because I could not sleep. “Why not pee?” I said to myself.  I carefully turned on all the lights, donned my specs, and shuffled to the bathroom.  I stoically sat down on the toilet.  Then resounded a  “Crash, bang” like the flash bangs the feds used when they raided the house next door last year. 

I missed the toilet by a foot and landed on top of the Weight Watchers scale, (ironic, aye) hitting my whole right side against the bathtub.  It hurt terribly but did not waken my house guest.  By the end of the next day the purple was spreading across the overly generous slope of my right hip but the rib did not go crazy till three nights later.  Now its taped and too tender to touch with even a feather duster.  Tut tut. 

Two workers , Skip and Akicito, have almost completed the greenhouse cleanup. When I go to look at the progress Skip warns: “I don’t want you out here”.  That’s because I am so allergic to the dust and mold and besides, she has found at least ten black widows out there.  Lots of other critters live in the dirt and crevices out  there too.  The photo above actually came from a slide I took in Colorado in ’77 but it looks like  a critter I pulled out of a box here yesterday. 

In a couple of weeks my friends are coming to help me pack my chatkas.. All of that will go into storage along with half my furniture in preparation for staging the house for sale, temporarily scheduled for Sept. 17.  Cross your fingers.  And when you are tempted to collect more little treasures from your travels, think again.