Sadiversaries, Dreams and Signs from Beyond

It’s hard to believe that I’m closing in on six years since Don died. Sometimes I still feel his presence around me and that’s a warm, fuzzy feeling that fades as fast as it comes. At other times, it seems like a life time ago that I had him in my life and I can barely remember who I was when I was half of a whole. Enough years have gone by now that I have a predictable “widow’s cycle” in the weeks leading up to his sadiversary. For me, that manifests itself by increasing my dream life. Every night for nearly a week now I woke up either in a near panic or upset because the guy who’d been my best friend and soulmate for 42 years was lost and I couldn’t find him or I could see him but he’s always just out of reach no matter how fast I run in my dreams. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to assume that while my daytime brain has accepted my reality my nighttime brain still fights against it. I hate the first half of January but I know as soon as his sadiversary date passes, the dreams will stop. In the meantime, when a dream wakes me up I can’t fall back to sleep. And so in the middle of the cold, sleepless nights it all comes back…the missing him, the loneliness and the regrets. 

I would worry about my “widow’s cycle” if I thought it was abnormal to have one this far out but having talked with friends and acquaintances who have fifteen to twenty years under their widow’s belts, I know it’s common to have varying degrees of depression or anxiety leading up to their own sadiversaries. It’s the ‘what if’ thoughts that are hard to push aside around the time our husband’s died---even for widows who have filled their lives with meaningful things to do. For me, the isolation of winter adds another layer of anxiety and thank goodness that I’ve got a mouthy schnauzer who doesn’t care about anything but getting what he wants, when he wants it. Sometimes I wonder what would happen to me in the winters if I didn’t have him pushing me around. Let me out! Let me in! Give me a treat! Time for breakfast. Treat---Give! Me! One! Right! Now! Play with me. Let me out again. Let me in! Levi goes on like that all day long. If not for him barking orders at me, my Fitbit wouldn’t rack up nearly as many steps per day as it does. 

I was supposed to go to a rescheduled Red Hat Society Christmas party today but it got canceled. Again. And it won’t be rescheduled a second time although there is talk of having a party later on to welcome spring when it comes or a Christmas in July party. The temperatures are barely above zero, it will be snowing all day and it’s too cold for the salt trucks to do any good on the icy roads. At least I’ll get to keep the scarf I bought for the gift exchange. I seriously didn’t want to give it away. I even plotted that I could “accidently” forget to bring it to the party as an excuse for not taking part in the game they play to exchange gifts. I’ve never done that but once at a party with another group where we each got to choose the still-wrapped gift we’d go home, I picked the gift I brought. Why gamble when you know you’ll like the one you bought? That’s my no-excuses thought process. I am what I am.

I’m sitting here pretending I still have something more to write about, but it’s just a stall tactic to avoid going outside to shovel snow and feed the birds. Yes, I gave in last week and bought some bird seed for the ground feeders. I wasn’t going to feed anything but the woodpeckers this winter and I haven’t been since last spring. But I reasoned that there’s too much snow on the ground for any mice that might be in the basement to make their way to the birdseed which is what I was worried about. The fall before last I found a stash of seed in the basement, carefully laid away by some industrious mouse. There must have been fifty saffron seeds carried one at a time across the yard, down the basement wall, across the floor and hidden in a storage box on a shelf. It was such a Herculean task that little mouse accomplished and I felt bad about throwing out his stash and replacing it with d-CON. Why do we punish these gatherers in nature but we feed the birds that don’t plan ahead? And I dislike it when my mind goes to questions like that because some people use that same line of thinking as an excuse for not wanting their tax dollars to go towards helping others who might not have planned well for hard times. I understand that logic but it gives a blind-eye to the Herculean mice-types in our society who did plan ahead but somehow they'd lost their personal "pile of saffron" through no fault of their own. 

As I sat here writing today, I saw a single mourning dove eating at my ground feeder outside the window. She gave me pause for thought because they normally mate for life and it’s very rare to see one traveling along. If they’ve lost their mate they’ll buddy up with another couple. Was her appearance tied into my “widow’s cycle” somehow, someway? A sign from beyond? Sign or not, her appearance made me smile. We are all children of Mother Nature---mice, doves and widows all following her preordained rhythms. ©

Taxes, Texas and Mourning Doves

Every dawn and dusk my deck rail is the gathering spot for three Mourning Doves to roost. Sometimes if I get up early enough I’ll even find them sleeping in my heated birdbath. Whether they are the same doves day in and day out, I don’t know but a trio of doves has been showing up for over a decade. Given the fact that the oldest known Mourning Dove was over 31 when it died, my doves could very well be long-time residents of my rail. I love the rhythm of life they represent, the sameness of having habits you can depend on and look forward to seeing. They are monogamous birds and I’ve often speculated about their couple plus one status. Maybe one bird is an off spring? Maybe one birds is a widow or widower or maiden aunt who never found a mate? Or maybe they’re all swingers living an unconventional Mourning Dove life-style. It doesn’t matter if we’re looking at people, birds or animals we all like to assign a back-story to what we see before our eyes.

Someone from Lubbock, Texas has been coming to my blog a lot lately. (My FeedJit tracks when visitors come and go and their city of origins.) You would not believe the back-stories I’ve been composing in my head to explain his or her interest in my blog. But mostly seeing Lubbock, Texas, show up on my FeedJit brings back great memories of a vacation Don and I took to San Antonio in 1990. Traveling around Texas the summer was a John Steinbeck kind of vacation. We hit all the back roads, going to out-of-the-way, tiny towns and we met many colorful and memorable people. We got a lot of mileage out of retelling the highlights of that trip including meeting our all-time favorite street person who took a liking to us and who shared her Rule for Living. “Never, ever buy food,” she said. “People throw out enough to feed an army!”  That ‘never, ever buy food’ would get repeated for years to come as Don and I would be walking into a grocery store.

I’d like to ask my anonymous visitor if she/he knows the name of a place not far from Lubbock that was no more than place along a country road that had a post office, a huge barn full of Willie Nelson souvenirs and a replica saloon from the Old West (not open for business) where Willie Nelson supposedly parked his tour bus when he was playing around Lubbock. My husband was a huge Willie Nelson fan and the people at the barn said it was okay to walk around the Nelson encampment if no bus was parked out front, which we did. Over the years I’ve wondered if the saloon wasn’t just tourist trap and Nelson never set foot on the place, but in my husband’s imagination he had walked the same porch as Willie Nelson and that somehow was like going to church.

Change of topic: People who’ve never lost a spouse wonder sometimes why it’s so hard to move forward. They don’t know that the reminders of our loss come at us when we least expect it. Like yesterday I went to our my CPA to get my taxes done. Well, guess what. Filing my taxes for 2013 is my first year of filling as a single person post Don's death which meant my taxes went up and I now owe $1,100. In the past we’ve always gotten money back filing jointly. My CPA set things up to have more taxes taken out of various income sources so that I don’t have to pay in the future, but at 26 months after Don’s passing I didn’t expect there to still be ‘widow’s work’ to wrap up. Duh, I should have known---yadda, yadda, yadda---but I didn't.

I've often compared my financial life to playing a game of Monopoly. One trip around the board you may get to buy Boardwalk and built a hotel. But always hanging over your head is the very real possibility that hard times or the tax man will come along and take all your houses and hotels. The moral of that little analogy is never, ever attach your self-worth to the things or money you accumulate while living. It's the people you've known and the people who you've touched that makes you wealthy. ©

P.S  Thanks to my visitor from Lubbock the mystery was solved! (See comments.) The photo above is of the place I was trying so hard to remember...Luckenboch, Texas. Thank you for, BTexas!