1015

 Saturday, October 15, 2022

In bed at 8:45, unable to stay awake, to watch the last segment of Alex Wagner's program re; Trump squirreling away government documents at locations other than Mar-a-Lago, awake by 5:30, out of bed at 5:50, 6 pss, 3 before midnight, 3 maybe 4 after, no nightcap.  31 degrees outside, cloudy, high of 53 expected.  Freeze warning in Milwaukee County.

Saints,  Heroes, and Miracles

I got up this morning as Geri and Lilly were returning to the bedroom from their second outing of the night, Geri with her CPAP mask still on.  I thought then as I have countless times what a good woman she is, what a care-giving, care-taking, generous, loving person she is.  I see it every day in how she cares for Lilly, feeding, walking, grooming, medicating, and attending, but I realize how much she has acted similarly to her brother Jim for the nearly 4 years he was with us, how she cared for and befriended my father when he lived with us, how she tends to her friend Elise with her Parkinson's, and most of her how she quietly cares for me.  My life is enriched by living in our house and living in this house is possible for me because of her.  She cares for our house and grounds like she cares for everyone and everything under her quiet, vigilant guard.  I all too often fail to appreciate the saintliness and heroism around me.  They are not states of being but actions, activities, and behavior.   Saints are people who do saintly things and heroes are people who do heroic things.  Both qualities are activities reflected in Matthew 25:31 et seq.  Both involve willingly subordinating one's own comfort and interests to those of others.  My wife, my sister, my mother - all saints and heroes.  Many, many saints and heroes in our lives, invisible unless we scrape the scales off our eyes to see them.  Ditto miracles, all around us -  'mere' existence, life, nature.  Trees, leaves, lichens, fungi, birds, mammals, fish, whales, penguins, . . . . Why? whence? whither?  Gloriosky!

T'is the season

The leaves are falling and as she does every Fall that means Geri is outside with her rakes, her shovel, and her garden cart collecting the fallen leaves to strew across the path she so laboriously created around and through her marginal or borden garden on the west side of our lot. This has become almost a family Autumn ritual especially since, a couple of years ago, our then-lawn-service guys blew away, sucked up and carried away a ton of leaves Geri had gathered with great effort to spread upon her garden path.  Hell hath no fury . . .  They are no longer our lawn guys.😡

Any Hope for Bananas Turned to Plasma?

It required longer baking time than the recipe indicated, but was firm enough and tasted like banana bread.  Salvaged!