Tiny little miracles

 Once again, I am reminded of how "tiny miracles" (oxymoron) seem to happen unexpectedly. Butch and I have talked about trimming some branches around the place. He wanted to borrow some limb loppers and hasn't been able to locate any. I suggested we buy some, and he thought it would be a waste, no more often than we needed them. And so...

We went for a walk today, together. That doesn't happen often. I had pulled some weeds yesterday and was feeling the results of overdoing it. The sore muscles reminded me to stretch them a bit with a walk. Butch is trying to change his sleep cycle so he was up earlier than usual.  So we walked and talked about trees.

As we neared the house a pickup pulled up in front of our house and Butch noted that they were in the tree business. And thinking of his climbing tools he asked them if he would be interested in buying his hooks and he said he would take a look. So a deal was struck and then we started talking trees and trimming. Hooks sold, trees trimmed all for a very reasonable price. I am amazed and eternally grateful every time these serendipitous things take place! And if you take the time to notice they happen frequently!

I stay to vote...

 Plan to Vote in Iowa?

Yes, we do too. However, it was recently brought home to me that we cannot receive an absentee ballot before October 19th.

Our usual routine was to go to the courthouse sometime in early October and make out our absentee ballot and be on our merry way to South Texas. But this year is different. Some industrious lawmakers have taken it upon themselves to tinker with the laws. Yes, we do see through the motive. For some reason, they think if they have fewer people voting and keep a good share of what they label “Less Desirables” from the ballot box it will increase their chances of winning. Could it be they have had a hard time winning in the past and feel a need to better their chances?  I see no good reason for these shenanigans. Every US citizen should be encouraged to vote, not hindered!

So how does this affect my everyday life?  In the past, we left for Texas around the middle of October. So what is stopping you, you might say? If we go to the courthouse before the 19th we can REQUEST an absentee ballot and they will gladly put it in the mail addressed to our Texas address on the 19th! By law, they cannot send it out any earlier. It can typically take 2 to 3 weeks for mail to get from Iowa to Texas and there are no guarantees! October 19th to Election day is 21 days. So say they mail it promptly and it arrives in the usual two-week window, arriving in our Texas mailbox on November 1st (the 14th day), leaving 7 DAYS to make the return trip to Iowa and arrive on Election day. How do you like those odds? If we choose this method we are playing Russian Roulet with our vote.

The alternate solution is to wait until the 19th, go to the courthouse, make out our absentee ballot, and leave it with the election people. And that is what we will be doing but why should we have to!

Friends heading for Florida are in the same predicament and their solution is to overnight their ballot back to Iowa. I see holes in this plan. They are hoping that everything works in an expected way. They may change their mind.

Barbara Brooker-an Iowa citizen

Feel free to copy. All Iowans headed South this fall need to be aware of the rule change.

Colleen's Column is back!

 I have missed Colleen's columns ALOT! My sister-in-law, Keri informed me she was back in business writing columns for Greene County News Online. And since I have friends who I know used to enjoy her columns as much as I do and I felt I should spread the word. Enjoy!

Barb

From Pathos to Bathos

August 31, 2022

~a column by Colleen O’Brien

“Why are people so mean?” asks my preschooler.

“Why are people so mean?” asks my junior high student.

“Why are people so mean?” asks my first-year college girl.

By the time she’s 21, she is no longer asking that question because she has a lot of required book-reading under her hat, is no longer within her parents’ cultural purview, and has met many people good and bad. Often, they’re both, she tells me.

What she writes in her Sophomore ethics class is “The world is not about me.”

That she is brighter than I is a relief. I was at least 44-1/2 when I got it.

I understand that each of us is center stage in her or his own private garden, but most of us have at least figured out that our secret garden is the place to which no one else is invited. In it, we tell only ourselves that we are the bravest, brightest, best-looking beasts in the jungle, and the quick-witted of us steer away from those we come across outside our hideouts who don’t know the rule. They always want mirrors handy, and I don’t want to play with them.

When I recovered from a case of break-through COVID-19 – about a month’s worth of moaning and groaning, hallucinating, trying to get the axe out of my head – I was relieved in many ways: to be alive, to be out of pain, to notice there was a sun in the sky.

It was a mere week later when I realized I now had rheumatoid arthritis, a chronic disease that had not shown up in my body for 22 years.

I turned into a princess, asked the universe how I, of all people, could get this killing disease when I made it through COVID. Hadn’t I suffered enough?

And yes, why was the world so mean?

It’s taken me the better part of a year to get over myself. Had I been a bigger person, I would not have whined (well, not as long); I would have quit napping after having to hobble across a room; exercised as much as my body would permit; unplugged Netflix; kept a journal of my misery through COVID and into RA.

And darned if I haven’t forgotten most of it already. I had a first-row seat to a world-wide pandemic and refused to write about it out of pure poor-poor-pitiful-me-ness.

I am now back to normalcy thanks to powerful meds that may kill my liver, but at least I’ll not die of pain.

I have taken my own sweet time, but I am finally resuming my work of writing and editing. Even as I approached both with a smidgen of martyrdom, once in position at my desk, hands flexing over my keyboard, I was suddenly doing things I loved to do – writing and fixing other writers. There’s nothing like it, for me at least. It takes me out of time, out of pain, out of worrying about the end of the world, out of my own secret garden which is already thick with weeds.

I still nap a lot – my body is now trained to it, longs for it, in fact; so, I indulge it. I’m off Netflix for no better reason than that I did something that screwed it up and have no friends who know any more than I do. I don’t miss it. (Yet). My mental focus is returning because I have something to zero in on rather than the Why-me? of life.

Alas, I’m still losing my words…my family’s favorite incident of this colander-brain phenomenon being when I couldn’t think of the word acupressure and said taxidermy instead. I didn’t like it that I was so off the mark, but a good laugh is as refreshing as a cold beer. And, if you can find any relativity between acupressure and taxidermy, other than they both have four syllables, drop me a line.