975th post

i'm comin' up on my 1000th post right away here...
& as i watch that number creep higher, i find myself wondering what the 1000 posts would have looked like had i started earlier.
i wish i had captured more of the big girl's babyhoods, 'cause man... these days it seems like time is so short - and they're growin' so tall. i've got my battered journals from those first sweet years though - and i guess they'll have to do.
i remember when we lived in Daysland; our sweet little paradise, till we ended up needing to leave because the mill shut down. We only had one vehicle - and Neil took it up to Wanham to the mill to make money while we held down the fort at home.
It was in those days - that Sloanie got sick.
My usual pert little peanut became a limp noodle. Where she used to run around non stop - keeping up to her big sister and ahead of her little one - now she could barely walk the length of our yard. i took her to the doctor and he did some bloodwork that confirmed her iron was really, really low.
i remember still, how she would snuggle her weary downy head into my chest and sigh. Her single honey coloured ringlet trailing down her back as her eyelids fluttered and fell. If my lap was otherwise occupied, she would climb up behind her nursing sister - curling her body around the littler one and get as close to mama as she could. Maybe this... is where her nickname, "softy" originated...
It seemed like a simple enough solution - to get her to take an iron supplement and watch her come back alive, but she hated that stuff...
"You're the mama!" my mama told me when i marvelled that she had gotten Sloanie to take it during a brief reprieve at Granny's house, "You're bigger than her, you gotta make her take it! She needs it!"
& so i'd try - & she'd weakly fight & cry...
'till i felt like giving up the fight & crying too.
i remember my doctor sending her to the hospital for some follow up blood work.
i strapped my hefty baby on my back and pushed Sloanie in a stroller and Cai was supposed to walk. Somehow, after bloodwork, Sloanie was too worked up to be strapped into a stroller - and Cai had missed a nap - & my memory of it is that i carried all three sobbing girlies *and* that darn stroller all the way home.
It must have been at some time in these years that i learned that being a mama means reaching down deep. Deep - like - deeper than you thought you were... Creating a new depth to that shallow teenager that thought her belly wasn't flat enough and that her work ethic was proved by the 72 hour work weeks during the summer between her college years.
So, maybe those earlier thousand posts would have exposed some of that growth... pushed back the soil crowding around those tiny first green shoots of maturity. Maybe they would have captured my bewilderment as i sat in small town after small town - following my husband - yet beginning to wonder, "where's me?"
& i think - it's okay that those thousand posts were never written.
Story opens... scenes begin and end. Some captured, some forgotten - some veiled, some gorily honest. Words fail to capture the reality - or succeed all too well - and it is... as they say... what it is.
So, i'll keep writing - 'till i don't... and the best that i can hope for - is that one day i look back on these one thousand posts - and see my Father's love - in the sunshine and the rain - giving richness to the soil -
that helps me to grow.