Me....Just the way I am....

I'm looking out the sliding glass door of my sun room, out past the beautiful stone back porch, on past my backyard and the backyard of my neighbor, past the greenbelt filled with native trees and medium cropped grass and brush..... and on past that area to the little bit of the golf course the we can see.  The sky is a pale baby blue and the clouds are long whisps of clumped cotton puffs in shades of pail gray. Where the sun is still shining in the west the clouds are reflecting it in hazy shades of white. News is on the TV in my living room....I'm not really listening....the channels are being clicked through...I'm busy watching momma birds carry twigs and pieces of nature fit for making nests....to nest that I can't see, but that must surely be tucked away in the awnings and under the pergolas in my neighborhood.  It's just a quiet normal day in the world of being retired. But I am drawn back to this morning and how even in what would probably be construed by many as just a pleasant little piece of heaven right here on earth..........the littlest thing can stir a memory, cause a sigh of helplessness, loneliness, heartbreak and tears to trickle down one's cheeks.

 It was a simple little Texas orange....you know (if you live in Texas), the kind they sell for 5 for $1.00 in H.E.B grocery stores. I cut one to put in my morning bowl of fruit.  I cut it like my dad used to cut his every morning........and that simple little orange and that simple little cut....cut right into my heart and the floodgates of memories of him came crashing from my heart into my mind and pouring out my eyes.  They say we all grieve in our own way. Some are able to grieve a short while and move on. Some take much longer.  Some know or pretend to know how to veer their thoughts in other directions to shoo away the sadness and the heartache.  But some, I guess like me, just need to let the hurt come out in tears. I try to shoo away the sad thoughts, to not let myself dwell on the loved ones I've lost to death or just lost track of.... I know I'm hard to understand because I can't explain the tears and the sadness....the quiet times. It's just me.  I'm not ashamed of it. 

 I admit it.  I cry....I remember my dad used to says I was  thin skinned and had a really soft heart.  Perhaps I am and perhaps I do.  Heck I cry at Hallmark card commercials and other commercials. I cry every time I see a news story of a dad or mom coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan surprising their kid at school.  I remember, as though it were yesterday, being glued to the TV when troops were coming home from Vietnam.....walking down the stairs of those planes, kissing the ground, running to their families....that's been 45 years ago and just thinking about that, writing about that, puts tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat.

My heart aches for the young friends I knew so briefly in the short assignments my dad had in the military as we followed him from base to base....friends that I probably will never find if I look for the rest of my life....where is Marsha Weaver with her 3rd grade braids in Rantoul, Illinois, where is Ruth who lived in Virginia when I was 11 years old, where is Suzy Potts who hung out with my sister and I when we lived on Wheelus AFB in Tripoli, Libya, North Africa....or Ginger Giles.....how often I think about and never correspond with my dear sweet friend Edwina and my Spanish teacher Norma Trevino...and Pam who I call "my baby sister"....Laughing Bob and even those I never knew but identified with on the days I went for chemo...

I guess all of us in some way or another wear masks to hide, conceal or soften the real people we are....or maybe it's just some of us who do that....maybe those of us that do that are the cryers because we don't let people know who we really are. I feel the person I really am, is the person who writes.  My heart and thoughts flows right down to my fingers and onto the keyboard.....and oh how I wish I could say that happens unfiltered.  But I have to be honest, I peel apart the layers of my thoughts and the words/sentences I write...I guess from fear that I might reveal my inner soul....the girl who struggles with her weight everyday....the girl that can never find the words to stand up for how she feels about a situation, the girl who in some crazy way wishes she wasn't retired but still working, the girl who feels like she never did what it was she really wanted to do with her life, the girl who still wonders what it is she wants to do when she grows up. I'm 64 so why do I reference "girl" instead of woman......I'm glad I'm a woman and don't have the concerns and peer pressure of being a girl today.  I'm proud of my age and chose to grow old gracefully letting the gray gently come into my hair.....but I guess perhaps like every (or many) 64 year old person.....I want to think of myself as a girl because 'woman' ...."64 year old woman" brings thoughts that time keeps on drifting into the future.....and all of a sudden I am in that age group when the ones we love so much...family...friends...people our own age pass from our lives........and unlike when you are a girl and summers seem to last forever and life holds so many years and so much possibility.........now you wonder where all the years went so quickly and why are they flying by now even more quickly.........why do the tears flow as you want to scream...STOP...
PLEASE STOP....please, time, just stand still for a moment or two....or a week...or a month...or a year....and you wish you could turn back the hands of time to make sure you told those people you cared about how you felt, how much they meant to you, how much you loved them.  I think of not only precious family but of friends, classmates, people who came into my life even if for just a brief time....I know that God put them there....them in my life and mine in theirs for a reason....for a lesson...be it for one thought, one message that is a part of who I am today.  

It is heartbreaking to lose a parent even when you know they are in a better place and no longer in pain, when you know they've lived a good long happy life.........and it's heartbreaking to lose a child or a loved one in the flash of a moment when a senseless bomb goes off in a crowd. 

All these thoughts, all this emotion......looking out the sliding glass door of my sun room does bring me to tears, but it also reminds my soft heart that "Everyday you have the ability to say...This is not how the story is going to end" (I think that is a thought or quote by Christine Mason Miller...but not sure). It reminds my soft heart that everyday you should tell those people that are important in your life how you feel about them....we never know what tomorrow brings....we never know what the next hour brings.....so to Marsha Weaver, and Ruth in Virginia, and Suzy Potts wherever you are.....to John (especially John who loves me with all his heart and shows me every day), to Mom, to my Sister and her family, to all my step-children and their children, to Carol Ann who knows my soul and her sweet family, to JoAnn , to all my relative in Louisiana, friends I've made in Maine, San Antonio, McAllen, Corpus, Dallas and all corners of Texas, Oklahoma  Arizona Mississippi, California, Japan, North Africa, Michigan, - and many more places I'm sure are slipping my mind ....I love you.......I cherish each of you in special places in my heart....and I am so glad you came into my life....

I hope that somewhere out there an old friend might be wondering...what ever happened to Peggy Stone...

I'm here....I'm cutting an orange the way my daddy did....and I miss him. But I know as the sun sets and still lights up the western sky in the hill country of Texas that my old dad is looking down and telling me to be tough.....and not so thinned skinned....and that I am what I wanted to be when I grew up.....
.............Me...just the way I am.

Now the sky is turning a million shades of pale purple mixed with baby blue and pale shrimp....the air is still and it is quiet.....the day is ending.........really when I think about it....another day in paradise....

Who knows...maybe tomorrow I'll wake up and remember the saying that "as the corners of your mouth goes....so goes your day"....Maybe tomorrow morning I'll cut the oranges a different way, smile with the treasured memories in my heart..... and feel like this: