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. ©
