Gap Year. Or Two.

 “There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps.

― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

Well...

Hello again! 

Wow...It's been a long time (2 years) since I've tried to sit down and put my thoughts into a post.  It's so much harder than I thought it would be!

First things first.  We are well.  

I think that's always the knee jerk reaction when we haven't heard from someone in a long time.  Something must be wrong!

Nope.  Everything's cool. Or cool enough considering. My absence from blogging was more of a response from my being too busy (at the time) to want to invest my time in creative writing.  

I'm a slow writer. I think. I type. I re-read. I delete.  Not fast at all.

Anyhow...When I was thinking how to approach my first post after a two year absence, I Googled "absence quotes" and found the above quotation.  It really spoke to me.

My first impression was one of sadness. But after re-reading it a few more times, I considered that (for me) it spoke of a life well lived.  Being old enough to experience the different phases that we all go through in life.  Sharing what we know, how we feel. To persevere through challenges.

"To grow around and between the gaps."  I like that phrase very much.  I suppose it speaks to my optimistic nature.

So...because I know that I would be curious if I were in your shoes...A quick re-cap of the major events over the last few years.

SM was diagnosed in December of 2017 with prostate cancer.  We caught it early and SM underwent the robotic prostatectomy procedure in January 2018 successfully.  Zero issues.

We are now dog-less.  Longtime readers might remember that at one point we had 3 dogs, Casey-pig being the last of our fur-kids to pass on in 2019.

I stopped vegetable gardening for a few years.  Just like blogging, it just took up too much of my time what with work and household chores.  I did keep up with my Zinnia bed though.

Then Covid hit and my world, like yours, shifted.  The practice that I worked at (elective surgery) furloughed everyone in March 2020.  We thought we'd start back in June but the company that owned us sold and I became unemployed for the first time in my life.

Which wasn't a bad thing at all.  But more on that another time.

After all, I need to have something to write about during these Winter days.