Loss

One of my best friends died at the end of August.

I found out I have a (non-life threatening) medical condition that means I pretty much have to give up baked goods, chocolate, and alcohol, which followers of this blog know are pretty much what got me through the last six years.

There are rats in my raised beds.

MyFolia is closing down, I guess, today at midnight Greenwich time. I keep dropping in to see if it’s still live.

Those things aren’t equivalent. Obviously the death of a friend outweighs the loss of a website. Non-Folians would say that losing an app cannot reasonably be construed as a loss. I’ll empty out that garden bed and replace the soil. I’ll give up chocolate chip cookies and wine after a long day, no big.

It’s not that I can’t change, or even that I don’t want to. It’s that it’s tiring, exhausting, to always have the changes imposed. Sometime I’d like to change because I decided to change. And this all happened within a single two-week span, til I got to the point of screaming to the universe, into the darkness: CAN WE BE DONE NOW?

But, I suppose, as I have before I’ll just change, and move on. Or?…

I will not move on
I will move forward, backwards, sideways
I will move over and under and around and through

I will move

I will dance
I will run
I will walk
I will spin
I will glide

I will fall

But I will not move on

Move on means move along
Nothing to see here

You have no right, or agency, or ability
to affect what you see

You are just a discarded scrap, moved along by whatever wind chooses to blow

I will not move on
Because I will not be moved
Because I deserve to be what and where and who I am
Because I choose to be moved or not to move

And I will not move on

 

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Fall, sort of

It’s not really fall, if you count from the Equinox. But September feels autumnal enough that I put away my collection of summer mugs, with their flowers and tomatoes, and pulled out the fall collection.

It’s cool and cloudy, and it rained overnight, about as perfect an autumn day as you could hope for. I have all the windows open. I went and picked about 2 pounds of thai peppers and roasted them for freezing, so I’ll have my own peppers through the winter. I’m making chicken broth, to freeze in ice cube trays, and will make some small zucchini breads with more garden bounty, to freeze for the winter.

I barely buy vegetables in the grocery store. An old housemate once admonished that all my food is “processed,” and I should eat more fresh vegetables. To which I replied that all their vegetables were grown in Chile, and how fresh is that, really?

There’s a little bit of extra broth that won’t fit into the ice cube trays, plus chicken meat from the backs that I used for the broth. There’s broccoli, chard, carrots, potatoes, and of course more zucchini in the garden, and some frozen puff pastry in the freezer. So that sounds like a pot pie for dinner!

When everything’s done, I’ll walk up to the grocery store in growing sunshine, and enjoy my sort of fall day.

(This is the sort of journal I’d have put on MyFolia in days past. Ah, well. Join me here, or on Facebook, now.)

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