Okay, so...
I've been feeling sad this afternoon, had a couple of crying jags over basically nothing, such as seeing an elderly couple sitting in the car behind me at a traffic light, and my sister speaking sharply to me on the phone when I called thinking I could just leave a message because she was at church, and instead she was already home and in the middle of lunch before rushing back over to church for their Christmas pageant. I guess basically I'm second guessing myself and being paranoid about whether I made a horrible mistake the other night by springing that very bold question upon David. Just can't figure out yesterday's vibe, and I guess I won't have a shred of an answer until I see him again. Rather than staying upset I'm trying to distract myself. I've got my Latin playlist going on my computer for the first time in forever (I usually tend towards sensitive, wistful singer-songwriterish stuff), have been doing miscellaneous household chores, just took a short walk down memory lane with the college student who talked me into pledging to the alumni fund, and am about to cook a big pan of spinach lasagna, so that's a start.
Another thing I know I can do to lift my spirits, as I found out a couple of weeks ago, is to get back into thoughts of gratitude. Not saying I'm gonna do another full-blown gratitude challenge, mind you, but I've been meaning for awhile to share this one story because it makes me so grateful for what I *do* have, rather than being in some other people's shoes.
My job previous to the one I have now was at a small business that operated out of a converted house in a neighborhood that was slowly being taken over by medical offices. Two doors down was a regular office building that housed a medical supply company, and the building in between us was a funky old house that they used as storage. Eventually plans were made to tear down the house and make a parking lot out of the property, and for reasons that I no longer remember, my boss and I and a couple of other people made a pilgrimage inside the house sometime shortly before the demolition.
I remember it was dark and dilapidated in there, full of used oxygen tanks and other medical junk, but the thing I remember most is that in the very back room was a makeshift bed of old blankets on the floor, apparently abandoned. Scattered around it were Christmas cards that had belonged to the person who had been sleeping there. I bent down to look at one of them, and it was addressed to "Brenda" and the "Merry Christmas" was written out, and signed with "Love." I just remember how sad I felt seeing that...what kind of Christmas must this Brenda have had if she was sleeping there?
And thinking about this now, all I can do is be grateful, as I said in a previous post during my Gratitude Challenge, that I'm not Brenda and that I have a warm clean safe place to sleep at night.