Summer, vulnerability and healing

Here's a Rose of Sharon tree from our side yard.

"Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts. When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it's like they are holding the baby of you." A. Lamott

This blog is my safe place. It is where I share my story, process things, and heal. In doing so, I've met some of the most amazing friends along the way, and to each of you : you mean the world to me. Even if we don't talk much, or we have just said a brief 'hi' online, I want to say thank you! To know that you know my story and still want to be my friend, that you say you admire me for sticking to my guns and speaking up... it means so much!

 

 

Here's a view of my garden out front this summer. I've been busy weeding it and transplanting vines to cover an old rock wall in my back yard. That and sitting out on the patio working on a tan.

 

This is a family photo taken on Mother's Day two months ago. Only two of my three sisters are here, as well as one niece and my mom. I have a feeling this is the last photo I'll have with my mother and I both in it.

I am not OK with that. But this is one price I had to pay for telling the truth in my family. I didn't know she would cut me off a matter of weeks after this photo was taken. But if I had a chance to have do it over, I would have told the truth all over again.

 

 

The plant on the left is a butterfly bush. This part of the garden is in my front yard. I have yet to see butterflies around this plant. Hmmmm.

 

 

 

I've been going on many long walks along these rail road tracks lately. Walking is cathartic. Especially on warm summer nights. Crickets rasping out evening songs. Charbroiled burgers wafting from backyards along the trail. Bruised honeysuckle lifting and falling in the air every now and again. Tangled thoughts unravelling. While the woods sigh in swollen humidity. And that breeze lifts the sweated curls off the back of your neck.

 

I get angry a lot. Angry at injustice. I feel like screaming or punching something. But I don't. Walking channels the anger and helps it temporarily evaporate out of me.

 

Queen Anne's Lace along the trail.  

 

And of course, summer isn't summer until a mushroom makes a random appearance in your yard.

 

 

 

 then puffs up in a matter of hours...

 

 

 taking on a toasty appearance...

 

 expanding...

This is all the further it developed. I knocked it over with a stick and then split it apart. The texture inside was spongy. Like one of those anisette sponge cookies dipped in milk, sort of. I would show a photo, but dissecting it was something that you had to be there to appreciate.