Yes, it's been a year since I last posted. A lot, a lot has happened since then, and in a nutshell, I'm profoundly grateful that my beloved and I are both still alive. While I have the mental and physical energy to do so, I'm posting again. It was very tempting to just give up and abandon the blogging thing, since I can't do it consistently. But I just plain enjoy it! So I will. Who cares if no one looks at it but me - it gives me pleasure, and that's enough. And if my memory continues to falter, these posts will serve as repositories of a few of the things that give me joy.
Long before we moved here to the housing project, when we still owned our own home, I dreamed of building a colorful "Little Free Library" (LFL) on our front lawn, with a curved bridge across the ditch, a bench for visitors to sit on while they peruse books, and an herb garden with scissors that passersby could harvest from... and sketched out my ideas in a sketchbook. But obviously things didn't work out. The biggest obstacle was that we couldn't figure a safe place for people to sit out there... the danger from limbs falling off of nearby aged, diseased water oaks was just too great. It was one of many dreams I've had to let go of.
But the universe seems always ready to offer an alternative to those with eyes and hearts open to new possibilities. I am still a maker, if only for minutes at a time, and welcome any opportunity.
A delightful white-haired maintenance man who worked here - for it seems just a few weeks - told me that someone had built a Little Free Library out in front of the community center here, and its steward had made a habit of looking for a specific author's mystery novels he liked to read and stocking them in the LFL. How wonderful!
So my beloved and I walked over to take a look. I nearly burst into tears of joy to see this LFL, just a short walk from our apartment, to which I can donate books. What a gift, that someone else did what I cannot do! I'm too fatigued to even imagine building anything right now - simply walking from the back of our apartment to the front and a few yards out to the sidewalk is exhausting. So I adapt and do what my body will let me. Lately, that's small things, done while seated. One of my moments of making in the last few months was printing out these LFL labels onto copy paper and coloring them in with markers. I'll glue them into the inside front cover of each book I donate.
Coloring them in was a quiet, calming, meditative experience.
Today, cutting them out on our old paper cutter today was equally soothing, enlivened by the anticipatory delight of imagining gluing them in and delivering them to the LFL. I can't wait!
